Starting with a finish!

Happy New Year! I wish you all a Happy and Healthy 2014.

In between all the cooking and clearing up I managed to sneak in a little bit of sewing to finish one of the projects on my Q4 FAL.

I had planned to make a cushion as a housewarming present for my son and his fiancee in October, but sadly never got around to making it in time for our first visit to their new home. So, instead I thought that it would make an ideal Christmas present.

The wine bottle fabric was a gift from Swedish Scrapper and the plain wool fabric was in a scrap bag that I bought on my last visit to Oxfordshire, both of them have been sitting patiently waiting on me to finally use them.

And here, at last, is the cushion! I roughly followed a pattern in Pillow Pop, but added the appliqued wine bottles and quilted the patterned fabric with a Free-Motion swirl instead of the straight line quilting in the book.

I am delighted with this and, thankfully, so were my son and his fiancee :)

I am even more delighted that this is my first finish on my list for the Q4 FAL!

The Q4 link up closes on January 8th, so I am hoping to sneak at least one more finish in before the deadline.

As it is a Thursday it wouldn't be right to have a post without a touch of randomness. I came across these wicker reindeer on a visit to a local stately home today. 

Aren't they lovely? Oh to have a garden big enough to put them in!

Comfortable Cafe Cushion

The Cafe de Paris cushion is finished!

It went together fairly quickly in the end, especially as I decided to do some simple straight line quilting rather than any fancy, complicated FMQ type stuff :)

Cafe Cushion quilting

I used my Hera marker to draw out the lines before quilting, and it was definitely easier to see the marks when I was sewing in the daylight!

The plan originally was to space the lines evenly around the centre diamond but a slight muck-up (sorry design decision!) early on meant that the spacing was irregular at each side. Fortunately, I actually liked how that turned out so went with it and mixed up the measurements on all of the sides!

The cushion back is an Envelope back with binding as in the pattern, but I am not sure about having an envelope back on such a large cushion. The cushion cover is 20.5" x 20.5" as in the pattern, and I think if I was making such a large cushion again I would go with a zipped or button closure.

I didn't have a big enough cushion insert when I finished this and had to go out and buy one. The cushion inner is 50cm x 50cm to give that stuffed look that I like.

The cushion pattern is from this book

There are several more projects in the book that I would like to make, but I will be checking the instructions carefully as there were a couple of errors in the measurement instructions for this cushion. The instructions lead you to cut the pieces for the back to be 20.5" wide but the cushion front is trimmed to 21" x 21" and the measurements for the solid strips for the top and bottom of the cushion front are 17.25" long when they should be 17.5". Neither of these were a particular problem for my cushion, but might be an issue if you were fussy cutting the squares for the top left and bottom right corners and then had to shave 0.75" off to make the pieces fit.

Apart from those minor blips the cover went together really well.

Not only is this a finished project so I can link up to Crazy Mom Quilts




but it is also my first finish for Q3 in

and my first project to link up for the Craft Book link up at



                    
and finally because this project is actually for me

So many birds with one project :)

If I had actually been to Paris on holiday I could even have made it my contribution to the

Sadly I haven't, but if you have and haven't decided what to do for the competition, to be in with a chance of winning some of that gorgeous fabric that's been posted about recently, then this might just spark off an idea or two.

Paris Cafe Cushion - progress

Now that I can tick the SMQ Bee blocks off of my list, it is time to turn my attention to some of my own WIP's.  Perhaps it is because we are heading off to France soon, but the next project to surface from the WIP pile just happened to be this.

The embroidery was started at a class at my LQS just over a year ago! I finished the embroidery and even ordered some appropriate fabric from Sew Me a Song to make the panel up into a cushion but that had been all the progress made since the class.

When I received a copy of Pillow Pop , compiled by Heather Bostic, for my birthday recently I discovered the ideal project for my embroidery. The third project in the book, Photogenic, is for a cushion cover that incorporates an embroidered panel on the cushion front, so the wait to start this project was obviously meant to be :)

And here is how my embroidered panel looks now with suitably French food and wine themed fabrics for the borders!

With some straightforward quilting and an envelope backing I might even have a finish for Friday out of this too.

So this is how my WIP list looks now

• In Color Order HST BOM - quilting started!
• Sunday Morning Quilt Bee blocks received, 2 more to be added by me
• Sunday Morning Quilt2 Bee 279 blocks made, 311 to go!
• Sunday Morning Quilt2 Bee - COMPLETED AND SENT
• Star of Africa Bee blocks completed and sent (only 2 left to make!)
• Scrappy Trip Around the World Bee Q2 - COMPLETED AND SENT
•  And Sew On BOM - eight blocks completed (One left to make!)
• Paris Cushion - top completed 
• (Almost) Irish Chain quilt basted  
• 5 blocks of NY Beauty QAL completed and fabric cut for remaining 5 blocks 
• 20 blocks of Craftsy BOM completed 

So, that's my progress this week, hope you have had a productive week too.

Linking up to