My October sew-along with Stacia and Deloise was Annette – a small and relatively easy pattern.
I’m not very good at flying geese but I used my glue baste and easy press solutions and I managed to save most of the points.
In hindsight I wish I had used the same colour of gold throughout but I was using up scraps for those 9-patches.
I did some very simple quilting as the piece is only 11.5″.
I hope this pattern is the hardest one in the book. Deloise struggled with it when it came up on her list and I know Stacia is also dreading it. It was my project for two months of sewing.
I tried to work the pattern exactly as the book said but I wasn’t able to get the Y-seams correct and everything was a mess. I salvaged what I could and tried hand sewing those Y-seams but still no luck. Anna went into the bin.
But I hated to give up so I came up with another plan. I would make the stars which, by comparison, were quite easy. The idea was then to appliqué the stars onto a background and avoid those Y-seams.
To some extent that worked but in order to get the right size I needed to trim off a quarter inch on each of the raw edges. I marked the quarter inch and used scissors to trim them.
The placement on the background isn’t quite right but it was good enough to add the border and do some dense straight-line quilting.
I was so happy to be done that I neglected to add the hanging sleeve to the back but I’ve stitched it on by hand and, hopefully, it will be strong enough to hold. I’ll hang it on my stairwell to replace one that I’m sending to Elizabeth.
Since it isn’t quite as the designer intended I’m calling this one Anna, version 2.0.
I think it is interesting to note that when Deloise was on an evacuation alert due to the forest fires her version of Anna is the only quilted project she loaded into her car!
June, 2023
Both Dylan and Will are graduating this year. In fact in just over an hour Dylan will be crossing the stage to get his diploma. I have to assume that Will won’t be looking at my website and seeing his card before he graduates at the end of the month.
Both boys have spent time on the Honour Roll; Dylan will be going to college in the fall and Will heads off to University.
This was my April project for the sewing day with Stacia and Deloise; I’m going through the book alphabetically while my sisters have picked a different path through the book. This is one that Stacia had already done so I was able to get some pointers from her.
When I was picking my fabrics, all scraps, I was happy that I had pieces already cut that fit the pattern almost perfectly. For another project I’d been saving 1.5″ x 3″ pieces; this called for 1″ x 3″ so it involved only a bit of trimming.
The piece went together very quickly and I was completely finished, binding and all, before our last check-in of the afternoon – a first for me.