HST's, and Assorted Other Bits

I have a number of irons in the fire, so to speak:

This star top was made some years ago, and has been waiting patiently to be finished up. I don't usually do borders like this, but I think this one needs it. So I spent some time this weekend making these 180 HST's and 4 corner stars. What a pain it is to make half square triangles! And those corner stars . . . an even bigger pain. All this is a bit fiddly for me, but the heart wants what it wants!  I still have to cut another inner and outer border, and make a backing, so there is still some work to do before I get to sandwiching and quilting this.

This red and white nine-patch is one I've been slowly chipping away at whenever I have a few minutes to just sit and sew. I like to keep something around for when I want to run my sewing machine, but don't want anything big to think about. I started with a few leftover strips from the Log Cabin, here, and it doesn't take much effort or time to keep enough 1 1/2" strips cut to make into these 9 patches.

And I made up a bunch of these sachets, with a bit of catmint inside. For the trouble maker! Because he only sleeps 5 minutes a day, and wanders around looking for trouble the other 23 hours 55 minutes! He had all of these messed up pretty quickly. He actually rips apart the fabric to get to the catmint inside. I'll have to put them away, and take them out one at a time for him.


I suppose there is no better time than during this cold and stormy January weekend to get a bunch of quilting done.

Busy, Busy

People have been trying to pry me away from my sewing machine, to no avail. I've been joining those blue and yellow blocks together. It is a big job, not only because there are so many blocks, but also because there are so many star points that I like to get all (mostly) accurate about. I've been considering how I might set them up in a quilt, too.

I've also been tearing apart the seams on a whole bunch of my uniform shirts for work. This leads to a nicely tailored look, but doesn't much advance my quilting cause. It is tempting to wear the shirts the way they come out of the package, but I like being a little non-standard, wearing my talent so to speak. Ladies at work are asking if I'll do the same to their shirts. No! It takes a lot of time, time I'd rather be quilting. I'm sure all you other quilters understand.

And the other thing I have going is printing. I tend to do things in big numbers, so I treated a bunch of fabric, cut it into printer sizes, then print, print, print. My next stage will be to treat them again, and then I can start quilting them. The printing experiment didn't work out the way I wanted, so I'm thinking of other things I can try. I was aiming to get brighter colours on my cotton prints. So I tried steaming to heat set, but this just blended the colours together. I would like to try a resist of some sort, but that will have to wait.

Oh, yeah, one other thing competing for my time. Garden planting is in full swing here in S. Ontario. We do quite a flower show in our yard, and plant many annuals and baskets, and a few vegetables. Poppies and peonies in bloom right now. We have a big heat wave going on, and I'm more comfortable inside, sewing of course.

Blue and Yellow

I have a couple of things on the go at the moment. I've been getting set to print more photos onto fabric, and have an experiment to try with that. Will explain after the trials. It takes some time to get everything set up and organized.


The other project is one I've been at for a long time. A few years ago, I decided to make a blue and yellow star quilt. I made a lot of these 6" blocks, almost 400 of them. I had this layout in mind, but decided to use some of them for a small wall quilt. I put away the rest of them to work on later. A couple of months ago, I pulled them out, and decided to get working on them. They all needed squareing up, so I'm almost finished that. Tedious, that trimming, but it needs doing. Soon, I'll be joining them together. I have to create a different layout, but that's ok.