Saturday Night Sewing

After spending the afternoon with my mother working working on adding fabric to square up some of her beautiful scrap blocks I came home keen to sew something.

Looked on my really untidy sewing desk, and picked on the pieces cut out for the asterisk blocks that

I didn't make for the July Lotto.  Stitched the first one but forgot I had cut the strips wider with the intention to trim, oh well, looks sort of ok.  Decided to just make the others with only half the strips, and I like them.  Six in-between Split-9-Patch blocks were completed, now have 56 done.

These are the before and after washing pictures of the Inktense scribblings. Yes there was some fading in the wash (60 deg C in a laundry bag in with the towels). And some shrinking of the fabric - it is from a pile of +10" squarish off-cuts from a local factory shop - given to me years ago by my sister - never washed them as I use them only for testing and cleaning my sewing machine.

The Block Lotto for September is a paper-based block.  And I remember reading somewhere long ago that to make copies of your foundation, layer up paper, staple the pattern and with an old unthreaded needle stitch along the lines.   Then you have accurate copies and are apparently easier to remove.  I have a box of wide fan-fold paper that came from the defunct clothing factory my husband had about 15 years ago.  I still have to sew the blocks!!!

Block for CQ

Made this sample block with a 5-1/2" centre square, finishing at 13".  Wrote the instructions for making it with a 4-1/4" square, so it will be a 12" block (finished).

And think it would be a fun quilt to make one day.  And I think I just learned something new - how to export a Marquee Selection from EQ7, and paste it here... so I thought!  But it didn't actual paste!!  Ended up saving it as a bitmap file, then using Picasa, exported it and it became a jpg file, and much smaller in pixels.  Have been pasting from EQ7 into Word docs but hadn't thought to try it like this.  It looks better than my cell phone photographs!

Deadline met...

On Sunday at about 6:30 pm I submitted my four written assignments for the Teachers Accreditation Course, felt quilte good about that finish, keeping fingers crossed for the results!  Have the practical assignment back, and achieved a pass mark - the lost marks were justified!  I was supposed to provide full size patterns for the 12" block and quilt, and I had only included a 50% scale version - really!, most of my quilts are produced from scribblings on 4" pieces of paper!. Have started re-reading and thinking about the final assignments, and am confident that I they will get done on time, and in fact looking forward to the end.

Took young George to the vet this morning to be spayed.  At nearly six months old it was the right time.  She was most put out not having any food.  She gets fetched this evening.  Think she will need extra-extra TLC.

Dearest P had to have a Carpal Tunnel problem in his wrist fixed on Thursday, and is happy so far at the results.  Stitches out in a week.  Then he has to plan the other wrist.


No pictures, sorry!