Welcome to Saturday Quilting Bring & Share 🙂 Bring along your projects, ideas and tips to add to the great mix of sharing going on in our Worldwide Quilting Community. There are some links below to get you started exploring what fellow patchwork-quilters have been sharing over the past couple of weeks. Join in by leaving encouraging messages, tips and ideas in the comments boxes of the blog posts you read.

Last weekend was super busy for us. On Saturday we were part of the team helping our son and his fiancée move out of their flat at short notice. We managed to get the van loaded just before the rain set in and enjoyed a welcome bacon-butty lunch before getting on with the cleaning. Next day DH and I used our Senior Railcards (a key advantage of being 60 years old rather than 59!) to travel to one of our favourite places, the Queen Elizabeth II Olympic Park in London. We’d been gifted tickets to the Diamond League athletics meeting.

Great seats looking down the sun-drenched stadium to all the action on track and field.

Phew! Quite a weekend! Other things have been going-on too including some multi-project action in my sewing room 🙂

Project 1: Colours of the Sea Quilt

I echo quilted diagonal wavy lines 2″ apart using a light golden yellow Aurifil thread on top and grey in the bobbin. The wavy lines seem in keeping with the seaside vibe I get from the colours of the quilt. I paused the project whilst deciding the fabric for the binding. Then had to wait to purchase and wash another half metre of the blue & green stripe fabric  (right foreground of photo) so this project was temporarily put aside.

Project 2: The Hexagon & Equilateral Triangle UFO

I rifled through the box containing this UFO, reacquainting myself with the size of the triangles (note to self: make notes to leave with projects so there are fewer mysteries to resolve when picking them up months or years later). Up on the design wall I loosely arranged the blocks before considering how to complete the quilt.

I figured I needed to cut strips of the background fabric with edges angled to fit the sloping sides of the hexagon units.

These all stitched together surprisingly quickly.

The flimsy measures 33½” x 35″. I had intended to add borders to make the quilt larger but looking at it up on the design wall I decided it is best left as is. Then decisions about backing and binding had to be made…. More waiting to purchase and wash fabric … So this project was temporarily put aside!

Project 3: Tote Bag Collection from a panel

A new project has been in the back of my mind for a few weeks. Prompted by a conversation with a friend who sells charms for zippers, stitch markers and the like. I was sharing the woes of online product sales with Mary, she suggested I should make some tote bags to add a different price point to my ‘collection’ of quilts and bags. I hummed & haa’d, found a pretty printed panel in my stash, pulled some coordinating fabrics from my colour bins before reviewing and adjusting my pattern to accommodate the panels rather than the 12″ patchwork blocks I usually feature on tote bags.

One bag is finished apart from the detachable soft grip handle (click for my free handle grip pattern), a second needs some top stitching and the other two need to be pieced.

In conclusion: I feel juggling three projects over the past couple of weeks has worked well. All three have progressed, I don’t feel overwhelmed, I feel hopeful all could be finished very soon and, most importantly, I’m enjoying my sewing time 🙂

Here are the links to our Worldwide Quilting Community:

There’s such an infinite variety of ways to make a scrappy quilt, with a limited colour palette or with everything thrown in! Cathy’s sixteen patch quilt top is a great example of all the colours working really well together. This would make a great leader-ender project…

Katy is trying to locate the name of a patchwork block she has made, can you help? (And if you own a Jeep and a plastic duck has landed on it Katy could be the sender!).

Straight line quilting with a walking foot is often a great option for both traditional and modern quilts. Suzy shares some tips to help get good results with this style of quilting pattern. She does recommend starting each line of stitching from the same direction. I do this too but I do make one change of direction: when I get to the midway point of the quilt I change stitching direction just to avoid having the bulk of the quilt in the throat of my machine.

So often simple and scrappy is best! Cathy continues to work through her collection of scraps and partially finished quilts. The quilt in this blog uses plaids and stripes to border transport themed novelty fabric squares. I hadn’t thought of making a themed I-Spy quilt….

Wow! Linda’s use of colour and ruler cut blocks makes an absolutely stunning quilt. I saw it first on Instagram and called it a ‘scroll stopper’! There’s more to read and see in Linda’s blog post, ‘Max Quilt Using Rotary Cutting Rulers‘.

Mariana’s pattern ‘Overture’ puts me in mind of paper snowflakes. Satisfyingly symmetrical with plenty of restful negative spaces.

Krista gives an easy to follow explanation of the construction of woven fabric and shares how using fabric strips cut in different directions can aid or hinder patchwork piecing. There’s also a link to a short video showing modern industrial looms in action. Those threads move so fast!

Linking with Alycia for Finished or Not Friday and Melva for Sew & Tell.

Happy Stitching!

Allison