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

Another list of hopeful finishes!

Doesn't time fly when you have a list of things that you want to finish! Having only managed one finish from my lovely hopeful lists of projects in the last 2 Quarters, I am continuing with the optimism for Q3 of the FAL at She Can Quilt.

 

Yet again top of my list to finish this Quarter is the HST BOM quilt I started at the beginning of last year!

The quilt top was backed, basted and bound at the beginning of the last Quarter and I even started the quilting, but then came to a dead halt. I really would like to get this finished so that I can tackle new projects without any guilt, so this is going to be top of my list.

Next on the list is the embroidered cushion I added last quarter as a small project that could be finished quickly! That didn't quite go to plan :)

As usual the delay in finishing this last quarter was more procrastination on my part, when I decided that I didn't have the perfect fabric to finish this cushion and "had" to order more from the US. The fabrics arrived weeks ago and have been sitting on my table top waiting for something to happen to them, so the time has come to stop the dithering and set to.  If I don't get a move on the embroidery will be celebrating its first birthday :)

More stitching for the third project on my list which has been all over Europe with me on my travels and really deserves to be finished by now.

I have been cross stitching this tea towel since we left Riga last year but, in my defence, only when we have been travelling. The band of stitching you can see above is the second band of two so I really don't have that much left to do on it. We have a couple of trips planned to visit our son and daughter-in-law in Oxfordshire and maybe a longer trip to France, so surely that will be enough time for me to finally get this finished. Fingers crossed!

My final finish for this quarter is not quite as advanced as the teatowel, but has been in progress for longer.

I have two blocks left to complete on this Craftsy BOM (from 2012!). They are both paper-pieced blocks, which is probably why I keep getting them out and then promptly putting them away again! This quilt was originally intended to be a gift for my son and daughter-in-law, and as they are moving back to the North East at the end of next month it would be really nice to have it finished in time for their move.

Well that's my list of hopeful finishes for this quarter, as you can see I am nothing if not optimistic :)

Linking up as ever in hope to

 

Q2 FAL - hope and ambition

Having only managed to complete one of my three projects for Q1 in the FAL, I am hoping to have a better showing at the end of Q2.

With the HST BOM quilt from Q1 already backed and basted, I really would like to get it finished this Quarter. So it will be the first of my projects for Q2.

In Color Order HST BOM

On a visit home last August I took a Stitchery Class at a LQS, and although the embroidery has since been completed the plan to make it into a cushion has yet to be realised. So this will be another project for Q2, and, hopefully, as it is a relatively small project one that can be completed without too much effort!

The other project carried over from Q1 is completion of the Sunday Morning Quilt from Round 1 of the Bee. The final blocks arrived in February so I really should have got around to putting them together by now, especially as we are already well into Round 2! My month in Round 2 is coming up in May, so it would be nice to have the first quilt finished before the blocks for the second start to arrive :)

 So that's the hope of the title and here's the ambition!

I promised my son and his girlfriend a quilt for their new flat ages ago, they even picked out the fabrics when they were home at Christmas, but since then I have changed my mind lots of times about what I am going to do for them. So, I am drawing a (figurative) line in the sand and the dithering has to stop. In Q2 I will decide upon a pattern and make it!

So these are my plans for Q2, as you can see I am always the optimist :)



Linking up to