When the September sewing date with Stacia and Deloise arrived I was barely ready. The kids had just left, everything in my sewing room was a disaster but at least I knew what fabric I wanted to use and where that particular bin was in the pile.

I barely had time to get the top done during our sewing day and it wasn’t until a couple of days later that I sat down to quilt and finish it.

Now that it is done I think it is one of my favourite miniatures. It will hang on the stairwell but I’ll first have to decide which of the other things hanging there need to come down.

I’m not sure when I started this quilt – the earliest photo I have of it was from April 2018 and the top was together by then. I know it was a project that my Thursday sewing group did together; not a big surprise that I’m the last to finish. Gail found the pattern online and shared it with us.

I have no idea why I had a fat quarter bundle of greens but this quilt used the majority of the fabric. I would have liked to have had enough left for the binding but fortunately I had other green fabrics so no need to go shopping.

The arrangement of the half-square triangles was tricky but with help from Gail and Jessie I think I got it right.

The quilting was very quick – just a series of straight lines. I am getting confident enough in quilting lines that I used both a white and a green thread on this.

This pattern is one that I fully intended to start on Diane’s birthday (January 30th) but for some reason I just couldn’t settle down to doing it. When I mentioned to Christy that I was going to make one she said she’d like one too. The project came up on my reminder list in March but, again, I put it off. With Christy visiting at the end of the month I thought I had better get at it.

The pattern was from the internet and there weren’t a lot of details on how to do it but the instructions for the measurements were good. They could have been a bit smaller in length from back to front but my test pattern fit well enough that I decided not to change it.

I pulled several fat quarters from my jungle collection that was purchased to make Elizabeth’s eel table topper. I couldn’t help but think of the Tiger King as I was putting this together. There are three different tiger prints in this. If I’d been a bit more careful with thread colour this could have been reversible.

I made very few changes for the cover I made for Christy; I just changed the way I did a few of the things since I knew how it was supposed to go together.

August 10, 2021

Another sewing day with Stacia and Deloise. For the very first time I was able to keep up to them thanks largely to the fact that they each had long telephone calls in the morning.

I enjoyed making the log cabin blocks; I had strips already cut in my scraps so all I had to do was find pieces that were long enough and then trim the blocks down after each round. Deloise has given me a new (to me) tool that has my seams straighter and the right size. For every project I’ve used it on it has saved me tons of time.

I wanted to try a couple of new things for the quilting. The log cabin blocks are quilted with a clamshell pattern on the diagonal. This was a pattern that came with my quilting rulers; I used the rulers to mark my lines but I used my walking foot for the quilting. I need more practise but I’ll definitely use this idea again but I’ll work on clamshells on the straight lines next time.

I also wanted to try feathers in the larger border; I had a stencil and I used it to mark the quilting lines. But when I got to the machine I wasn’t able to tell where to go from one feather to another so I stopped and ripped it all out. Then I tried to freehand draw some feathers but what I ended up with are more like leaves but that goes okay with the fabric I was using. I will try this again but do some practising on how to draw those feathers.