Stitchin At Home: January 2021

Saturday 23 January 2021

Daisy

Challenge 2 of Project QUILTING Season 12 is fussy cutting. I am going to try and make a placemat for each challenge, whether or not I'll be successful depends on what the challenge is. Time will tell if I succeed or not. The second goal I set for myself is to use fabrics from my stash/older fabrics.

Let's see how I do with this challenge and my goals. My favourite block is a star block, so that was the starting point. The fabric I choose to fussy cut was an Anna Griffin from 2013, yup time this one got used.

decision time, what to fussy cut from this piece

I forgot to take pictures as I was working on this, everything just seemed to fall into place and I never thought to grab the camera. I turned under the edges of the cutout and used the buttonhole stitch to stitch it to the square for the centre of the star.

please excuse the colours, I think the sun went on holidays

I tried to keep the quilting simple

For the quilting I echoed the daisy and stitched in the ditch around the cutout. The yellow squares got straight lines. As you can see I did do feathers on both sides, I love feathers and just couldn't help myself. I used Thermore batting once again for this one.

for the backing I used a piece of the Anna Griffen fabric

So how did I do on my goals? Made a placemat ✓ Used stash/older fabric ✓ A win on both counts.

The next challenge is January 31st. Wonder what it is and how I'll do on my goals?

Tuesday 19 January 2021

Shattered Heart

In Ontario, where I live, we are in a lockdown situation to try to curb the numbers of Covid cases. Ontario Declares Second Provincial Emergency to Address COVID-19 Crisis and Save Lives. These lockdowns are hard for a person living alone. I have been trying to do more walking to keep myself active. I have also been slowly getting back into quilting. The blog hops I have been in recently have helped, I think my mojo may be returning.

Now let's get to the 'Hearts on Fire' blog hop, hosted by Carol of Just Let me Quilt. The rules were simple to make a heart project, only the heart can't be red.

I ran a few different ideas through my mind but kept coming back to the same one. What else was I to do but go with it, I started with a quick sketch of an idea.

graph paper comes in handy for quick sketches

Now that I had an idea I needed a plan on how to make it. Improv came to mind, although not my favourite method. But what the heck I might as well go right out of my comfort zone while I'm at it.

I pulled out some Island Batiks that I won from Sandra of MMMQuilts.

My hubby's favourite colour was blue and mine is green and those batiks were perfect for what I had in mind.

I started to cut a few strips of the background and the coloured pieces and stitched them together. I was all in if it worked so much the better if not maybe I could paper piece it.

As I stitched the pieces together I added a background piece to each side.

slowly coming together from deepest green to blue

I kept thinking I hope this works and looks okay.

A narrow 1/2 inch inner border and an outer 2-inch border. For the quilting, I kept it simple and just echoed the heart shape.

After all that worrying about whether I was going to like it or not...I do.

Sit back relax and see more hearts on fire from my fellow bloggers.

Friday 8 January 2021

A Touch of Yellow

Challenge 1 of Project QUILTING Season 12. The first challenge is Illuminating + Ultimate Gray, make a finished project, any size, using yellow & gray, and post by January 10. My project is a placemat I call 'A Touch of Yellow'. I pulled the fabric for this one from my scraps, yellow is not overly abundant in my stash or scraps, thus I only have a touch of it in my placemat.

The colours are a little off as we have had a lack of sunshine lately.

I used up all of the print fabric I had, I received it from another quilter and have no information on it, but I thought it was perfect for this project and used it as the inspiration for the design.

I used Thermore batting and like it for projects like this. I used Aurifil # 4670 a variegated grey 40 wt thread, and did simple straight line quilting, which is hard for me as I love doing feathers and swirls but felt that the lines would look best on this piece.

The finished size is 14'' x 11''.

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