Wednesday 5 August 2009

The Stitching Begins!


My goodness, getting my photos to here was a mission today! Something is wrong in blogland. Please excuse the order of a couple of them, nothing I can do about it I'm afraid. It was being very selective about which ones it wanted me to use apparently. And did I mention how slooooow it was?!!

Anyway I didn't come here to complain about computer issues. See what I have been doing with all those lovely fabrics? Basically making up my own jelly roll. I got quite a sore arm holding down the ruler whilst cutting 2 1/2 inch strips. I was worried it would move, so probably used a little too much pressure. Never mind they are all done now and hopefully there will be plenty.
I also cut all the flower petals out and these other square pieces. We decided to use our favourite fabric for the centres of the squares. They are surprisingly very large too, much bigger looking than what you imagine from looking at the book. They don't even look so big in my photos. Honestly, they are big!

Then I had a bit of a play with different combinations. It's really difficult to know what to put where. I might just go for it and hope for the best. I'm quite sure it will look fine as the fabrics are all so lovely anyway.

Taking photos of the fabrics is really useful, as I then have a record of what I have tried and what I like. Does anything look really bad to you?

I haven't cut any of the strips yet as I have moved onto the hand sewing of the flowers. Good to get the time consuming bit out of the way so I can get stuck into sewing of the whole quilt at the same time.

Oh look here is a little bird enjoying a bite of apple on the tree. They really enjoyed their treats. We ended up with four apples for them, as they all seemed to be going off. The apples that is.

Here is one of the flowers. Sorry about the dimness of the photo. They are quite enjoyable sewing by hand and take about two hours to do from the placing and pinning stage to completion. I have always enjoyed hand sewing, that's all I used to do in fact.
Now I have two of the six flowers done.

Oh look, another bird or two! These bird photos were taken by Husband A with his fancy lens. They were being very brave hanging around for a photo. The birds are Wax eyes and are quite tiny with yellow rings around their eyes .

I don't have as much time for blogging these days, now that No. 3 has started afternoon kindy three days a week. I have become a big kindy girl too unfortunately, as she won't let me leave! But today she is so exhausted after music this morning, and a full day yesterday, that we have decided to stay put. There was door slamming and shouting when we arrived home!! Not nice.
I think we will have a quiet time and then go to the library when the girls arrive home from school. The craft section at our library is very thin on craft books. Not much at all in fact. Rather disappointing.
I should make the most of my afternoon off. Perhaps after I've hung the wet washing, I shall make a start on another flower.

7 comments:

Joan said...

Oh... I grew up with line-dried laundry, and I line-dried my (now grown) babies' diapers (nappies?) But almost no one seems to use clotheslines in the U.S. any more. Nothing smells better than laundry dried outside.

Abby and Stephanie said...

Love the flowers. Hanging laundry--my grandma used to do that. She never had a drier. Love the smell of sheets fresh from the line.

Anonymous said...

Sarah ,this is going to be a very beautiful quilt!!!what about the stripes : everything looks great ,my favourite combination is in the 6th photo , but the others are nice, too.
You've got very good taste and can combine colours well.
The flowers are gorgeous and a huge job to sew them by hand !
hugs:Manka

Michela said...

Wow! Spring has officially begun in Auckland! ;-)

Lululiz said...

Wow, you are such a neat handstitcher ( not that I am surprised at all, remembering your mega neatlarder cupboard, humph . I can't see any evidence of stitching at all! NOTHING!NADA! The flowers are gobsmackingly gorgeous. I love the colour combinations you have chosen for them.

meg said...

The city library has a great selection of sewing and crafty books. Also you can request books online (you probably knew that) and they'll buy books in for you if they don't have what you want (and you get it first yay!). Hope things get easier with kindy.

kathy said...

Hi, The trick to laying out those strips in Fanciful Flowers is to alternate from warm to cool colors as you go. Then, any combination works. Fanciful Flowers looks good in those colors and I LOVE those bird photos. kathy