Small finishes

Last night I tidied up the sewing space so that today I could move all the stuff that had accumulated on the quilting frame into the said tidied space!  Not having used the frame since the beginning of the year there was a fair amount of stuff.  Chucked out some it and felt good (eg the old iron with fusing stuck on it, that was keeping just in case I used fusing again, empty cardboard boxes from the new iron and lamp!).

I needed to reacquaint myself with the frame and machine, so cleaned and oiled and new needle in, loaded up a small quilt top we had made at our group back in March.  Just the thing to practice on.  It is not a computerised machine, so it is my shaky version of free-motion quilting.  Backing is a sweet brushed cotton contributed by Lindsay.  Only one disaster, breaking the needle off in my finger - no pictures of that, too gruesome, but no blood on quilt!  Put in the second new needle!  After this, I'm ready for the three school quilts!

 

And here are some other small fun things, a pair of socks that turned out a bit bigger than expected.  It's the first pair (and maybe last pair) of socks that I will knit!  My adult son says he'll wear them!  Knitted all in one from the toe up. 

And because there was some wool left (and plenty more in different colours), I figured out how to knit a 2" hexagon, and this I might make more of.  It was knitted on four needles from the edge to the centre.

And one last picture of the handprints of my sister and one of the teachers in her school, to go on the back of their class quilts:

 

One sample 6" block done for Bonnie's year-long leader-ender project.  I have lots of triangles cut, and have stitched quite a few of the 2" half-square-triangle elements that run diagonally in this block, and plenty of 2.5" squares from cleaning up scraps. It's not a race, but am curious to see how many I can make of these over the next year - I hope to have a least enough to make one single-bed size quilt (I was going to work out how many that may be, but decided not to think about it!).