TGIFF! - Thank Goodness It's Finished Friday

Welcome to TGIFF! I am delighted to be hosting this week's round-up of finishes.

If you are new to my corner of blogland, welcome and feel free to have a nose around. If you are a regular reader pick yourself up off the floor I actually have a finished quilt to share with you!

This quilt was originally intended to be a present for my mum's birthday - last June! So it is a bit overdue to say the least. There is nothing like a new deadline though for concentrating the mind :)

The quilt came about when I was looking for something to do with an embroidered linen panel that I had made using embroidery motifs from Sublime Stitching by Jenny Hart. A lucky win in a Fat Quarter Shop giveaway and one FQ bundle of Riley Blake's Sunny Happy Skies fabric line later and the plan for a lap quilt was hatched.

The embroidered panel was given an inner border of the multicoloured stripe from the line and then an outer border of 6" friendship stars was added. I managed to use nearly all of the fabrics in the line, the only exceptions being three FQ's of cute pandas,  which weren't really appropriate for a senior citizen!

I decided to bite the bullet and have another go at FMQ'ing with this quilt, so the centre panel and the striped border were quilted with a loopy meander.

I am not saying it is perfect but I did discover that playing Cd's that I can sing along to are a vital part of my quilting experience. it means I remember to breathe! An ABBA Gold CD was particularly successful, just the right tempo for consistent stitching :)

This is also the first of my finishes for Q1 in the Finish a Long (see here for my original post).

Don't forget that next Friday, January 25th is the first linky party for

your chance to let us know what you have tried that is New to You this month! I am really looking forward to finding some new activities to try. Check out this post if you want to know more!

Now it is your turn to link up your recent finishes. Be sure to include a link back to here in your post, you can grab the button from above or the sidebar.  As ever, take some time to look at other links and maybe leave a comment or two. It will brighten up someones day!

Friendship Stars and Free Motion Quilting

My faithful sewing machine does not know what has hit it these last few days, not content with making buttonholes and trying out machine embroidery on the Dresden Sunflower cushion, I have been trying out another new (for me) function of the machine.

The Time for Tea quilt was backed and basted but I have been putting off doing anything about the quilting as I know what I would like to do - teacups in the border - but don't know how to achieve it. Never having attempted any quilting other than straight line and echo quilting, it is a big leap to contemplate fancy motifs, even if this is only a lap-size quilt. I did, however, have the 4 spare Friendship Star blocks as a result of my shockingly bad maths, so now had the opportunity to play with them.

Bordered with another dotty fabric from the Sunny Happy Skies line, then backed and basted the quilt square was ready to be practised upon. Beforehand though, I checked out Leah Day's video tutorials on Free Motion Quilting, to help with the machine set up, as the machine manual was sadly lacking in this respect! Armed with this knowledge, I set to.

What fun! How tense! Oh dear! Not so bad! All ran through my head in the space of a few seconds, whilst also trying to remind myself to breath and relax my shoulders. I have new found respect for the FMQ experts abounding in blogland, their hand-eye co-ordination is amazing :)

It wasn't perfect by any means, but when I got the hang of moving the quilt sandwich evenly my FMQ stitches even began to look quite respectable in places! In other places, not such a good result, but it was good fun. I think it will be a while before I am rattling off dancing teacups, but at least I can add another new technique to my mental list of things tried.

I didn't get too carried away though the Friendship Stars were echo quilted first, before I tried out the meandering loops on the dotty borders!

Having seen the photo of the cushion I am now regretting using two such similar prints for the bottom-right star, as I don't think the star stands out as much as it could do, but as these were spare blocks anyway I shall just chalk it up to experience.

Fortunately, the Friendship Stars in the quilt itself are better balanced.

Last weekend we visited a Coin and Collectors Fair here in Riga. The stalls were mainly geared to Coin, Stamp and Postcard collectors but there were a few other interesting items to be found.

 These medal ribbons were a glorious jumble of colour in the midst of all the military paraphernalia

And these Christmas Decorations seemed very out of place on a baking hot day! Not that there has been that many of these this summer in Riga.

Have a great weekend.

Linking up to TGIFF

Time for tea

This week I have been enjoying working on want to rather than need to projects. So the pressure has been off me, which is just as well as the husband has had a really pressured week and there in only room in the household for one person under pressure at a time!

Today I have finished the top of my afternoon tea quilt that I started many moons ago, and has been gathering dust wrapped up in a map roll on top of the wardrobe ever since. As the quilt was intended to make use of an embroidered panel there was no pattern for the top, so I had drafted out the cutting and sewing measurements myself. Although I knew maths was never a strong point of mine, until today I hadn't realised quite how bad I was! According to my calculations I needed 28 6.5" blocks for the second border on the quilt, so I duly cut and pieced 24 Friendship Star blocks with the intention of making 4 different blocks for the corners. When I laid out the quilt centre and pieced Star blocks I discovered that my calculations had been way out, instead of needing 28 blocks in fact I only needed 20! So out with the seam ripper to take off the extra 2 blocks on 2 strips.

The dodgy maths mean though that I have 4 Friendship Star blocks ready to make up into a matching cushion, so it wasn't all bad.

I would love to be a bit more adventurous with the quilting on this lap quilt and ideally, quilt some form of teacup in the striped border and on the linen centre, but that may just be a bit over-ambitious as I have never even tried free-motion quilting! All tips will be much appreciated.

Last weekend there was a large pan-Baltic Folklore festival in Riga, part of which was a Craft Fair and open-air concerts in one of the City parks. I was delighted to see these girls with their flower headdresses working on their looms and thought you might like to see them too.

And just to prove that all you need is attitude to carry off the flower wreath look!

Have a great weekend.



Linking here and here

Three down, twenty-one to go!

This weekend I decided to forget all of the commitments I have signed myself up for and spend some time working on a project that is just for me. I started my Time for Tea quilt a while ago to make use of a piece of embroidery that had been gathering dust in the cupboard. The first border has been attached for a while and the 2.5" squares for the Friendship Stars I had planned for the second border have been cut for ages too, so this weekend I decided was the right time to make some more progress.

I discovered when I started marking the squares for HST's that I had been too generous in my cutting and had twice as many squares for the triangles as I needed, so I only needed to mark, sew and cut 96 squares! Still, there is a quilt in the Sunday Morning Quilts book that I would like to make sometime that uses leftover triangles, over 500 of them (!), so at least now I have the start of a triangle stash :)

Ignoring the rising heat and then thunderstorms around me, I determinedly ploughed on with the sewing and cutting to produce 72 pieced strips for the blocks.

The fabric is Sunny Happy Skies by Riley Blake and is rightly named, because they are such cheerful fabrics. I had time, just, before the Men's Championship Final at Wimbledon kicked off to get a couple of Friendship Stars sewn up too.

So, progress has been made, but as the title says only 3 down, 21 to go!

Whilst watching Wimbledon my latest project from Made in France, Cross -stitch in Red, white and blue was the particularly apt strawberry pattern. I stitched it on a small hand towel that I bought in a textile factory outlet in Estonia on our last trip there. Fortunately being one colour the pattern was not too complicated as I couldn't have coped with the anxiety of watching Andy Murray's gallant performance and a complex cross-stitch pattern!

Hope you have all had a productive weekend too.

This week's posts on the Let's Get Acquainted Blog Hop are from

July 10

    Jenelle from Echinops and Aster  

    Julie from Bedsheet in the Kitchen

July 12

    Rebecca from Sew Festive Handmade 

    Marti from 52 Quilts in 52 Weeks

Rebecca has a Christmas in July event going on at the moment, so if you want to be more organised this year (or in my case just organised) be sure to check out her blog! 

 

Linking up to Manic Monday