Did I tell you about the time...?

Did I tell you about the time I decided I had to make a hottie cover immediately? And it had to have a unicorn on it. I used a 'pattern' from Spotlight which in retrospect was probably better described as 'very broad guidelines'. Not being one for reading patterns before starting, this only dawned on me part way through.

So once again I have made the skinny jeans version of something. A long time ago I did the same with a Kindle cover. Never mind, I wrestled the hottie in and I don't imagine I will be taking it out all that often.

I sewed the back flap on in the wrong order so it is a little unconventional :-) The good news is that it doesn't seem to have caused any functionality issues.

I was so taken by the colour combination I decided to use up the scraps by making a baby quilt (or perhaps a mini lap quilt). Here are a couple of shots of the quilt top enjoying some rare winter sun.

It's 40x48" so it shouldn't take those quilting fairies too long to quilt up when they turn up at my place. Cross-hatching I think - I must remember to leave the fairies a note and perhaps some scrummy afghans.

Gypsy Wife {the July edition}

I made a bit more progress on Gypsy Wife today. I'm pleased with my decision to start working my way through it section by section, rather than the original schedule. It means I can keep a bit more of an eye of how its coming together. It's not easy though, it is a very different type of quilt to those I am used to making so it stretches me.  I don't have too much of a plan but I'm trying to keep an eye on value, and trying to not end up with pockets of similar colours in one area. Note that the last point hadn't really impressed itself on my brain when I put this part together and I've ended up with a green/aqua band. Still, unpicking is not my gig, so it shall remain.

I love the vertical lines that are in this quilt. Now that I can see some of them appearing I am happy! I have managed to devise a highly technical system to keep the strips in order when I am not using them. Exhibit A:

Yes, the trusty old safety pin has many uses. You can also see the notes that patient Liz made identifying which block goes where, which she then kindly passed on to me. As previously mentioned this pattern is a tad light on detail. And I can be a tad light on patience :-)

Aerial {a finished mini quilt}

I finished hand stitching the binding on my Aerial mini quilt last night. Yippee.

I didn't follow the pattern exactly. Sometimes I had to redraw some of the lines as I was going (it's paper pieced) because I had miscalculated the size of the fabric needed. I was using some small Oakshott pieces I had in my stash, so the design process was constrained by the concept of 'available fabric'.

I used a grey Aurifil for quilting, choosing one that went best with the grey frame and quilted it at 1/2" intervals. I marked a few lines first with my Hera marker to keep things reasonably straight, then just filled in the gaps using my walking foot as a guide.

You can see the quilting lines are not perfectly straight. The Oakshotts were a bit shifty after I had taken the paper off so I decided to have the same imperfection echoed in the quilting. (Do you like the way I make it sound like I have some control over how my quilting works out???)

I even made a little dowel system for hanging so its ready to go up on the wall in my office. The cat quilt currently there is going on a break :-)