ATC Friday

These three sets of ATCs are Round Robins where I started the card. These are always fun because you never quite know what direction the card is going to take when you send just a background or a card with very little to it off to other people to work on. I love these ladies with their sequin hair. Awesome!

ATC Tuesday

Four cards for a swap with a map theme. All four of mine use a map as the background, with a variety of random collage items. Emphasis being on random!

Revisiting my Journal Quilt Project, week 41

 This week (ten years ago) I made an arch, for an arch swap, with a jellyfish theme, and then carried that theme over into my journal quilt. I'm sure I've done some fabric postcards in a similar vein as well - well, if you have a good idea, might as well make the most of it!

Block Lotto blocks

A few blocks for the block lotto - I haven't played lately, but sometimes I like to. The theme on this month was a California poppy theme - the green blocks are much more green than they appear in the photo and the other colours are supposed to be representative of all the different colours of California poppies that you might see. It's a nice idea.

ATC Friday

Here are a couple of round robin card sets where I made the backgrounds and sent them along.  This first one is kind of a cheat, because the background came from an old piece of art from Sarah's GCSE art folder - I cut it into pieces and added some tape, but I just thought it would make an excellent background - and I was clearly right.

I do like sending very general backgrounds out, just to see what they inspire other people to do!

Of course, sometimes it's fun to send a more specific background out - this bird obviously provided a lot more direction than the background above.  I like how the two others who worked on this card left quite a lot of open space on it - it suits the bird, I think.

ATC Tuesday

This swap, you can probably tell by looking, had a Jane Austen theme. I decided to do cards from four different books, rather than stick with one or two favourites. I did, however, avoid Emma, which is the one I like least. 

Revisiting my Journal Quilt Project, week 40

Apparently, when I originally was doing my Journal Quilt Project, I missed this week out - not sure why; perhaps we were on holiday. Anyway, what I did afterwards was simply print out a composite of photos from this summer onto fabric and quilt some words around the edges - Summer 2008, tennis, picnics, museums, days out, sleepovers, gardens, farms, friends, parties, bikes, cinemas, zoo, castles, shopping, fun. Makes me feel better to have that week covered, and although a lot of those events weren't from that actual week, it's representative of our summer!

ATC Friday

This is one of those round robin cards that I can't quite decide how I feel about. I like the finished card, but the starter had a really nice (admittedly, big) stamp in the centre, which barely shows at all in the finished card. Seems kind of a shame to lose it.

And a set with a shoe theme - kind of fun. 

Cotton Robin, quilting

And here's the final quilt I worked on for the Cotton Robin - the one which I quilted and bound. Mostly it's a shell design, except I quilted a big leaf in the centre. 

Cotton Robin, second round

Here's the next round I worked on. The idea was to add some bushes and grass and a sun in the background, but on reflection I think the bushes look a little odd. Too late now to do anything about it, though. 

Again, the finished quilt can be seen in this post, if you scroll down.

ATC Tuesday

These cards were for a swap with a theme of "Found Poetry" - the idea is that you use phrases from books or magazine to create poetry. You try to avoid using individual words, as that's too easy. It's more fun if you use whole phrases. 

Revisiting my Journal Quilt Project, week 39

Sometimes, looking back on a Journal Quilt, it's nice to see what else was going on in my sewing/creative life during a given week, as it often informs what the Journal quilt was like. This is one of those weeks, so I thought I'd show what inspired the journal quilt.  Apparently, there was a swap for little houses, which I made this week, hence the housey nature of the journal.

Here are the houses, and what I said about the at the time:



"Today, I worked on (and finished, hoorah!) the little row houses for the swap on Lenna's Creative Swaps site - I have photographed each of the little houses individually as well as in this group;  if you want to see them in more detail they are over here on flickr. They are all fairly small - can't remember the precise dimensions of all of them, but they range from about 1.5" to 3.5" wide and 2-5" tall.  I like all of them, but I think my favourites are the butterfly (top row centre), the door (bottom row, 2nd from left) and the rust coloured one (bottom row, second from right)."

ATC Friday

For both of these sets of round robin cards, I was the third (final) player. So I finished these off, continuing the bird theme. This was easy to do because there was lots of space on the card. 

These were harder becuase the card was quite full, so I went with my go-to embellishment - some words. 

Cotton Robin, first round

Here's another part of the Cotton Robin round robin I took part in this year - this was my turn to add a first round - I received a maker's centre block and added a round to it, then sent it to someone else for another round. 

Here's what it looked like when I finished with it.  The completed quilt can be seen here. (You'll have to scroll down, I can't link straight to the photo.)

ATC Tuesday

Another set of cards from a "pick-a-theme" swap - another group of Altered Playing Cards. We have a bird theme, 

Paddington (for a theme of famous children's literature characters)

A Shakespeare theme

And a theme of tigers (or possibly white tigers, I can't remember). 

This card was for the hostess. 

Revisiting my Journal Quilt Project, week 38

This Journal Quilt block was made from a rejected block from another project - hence the colour choice, which is not something I'd normally go for myself.  I had made a multi-point star block for someone and didn't like it, so made a different one, then added to it to make the Journal Quilt. Serendipity, I guess.

Finished Baby Quilt

So, here's the finished and bound baby quilt, ready to pack into my suitcase to take with me to the US and post off to the new owners, once their bundle of joy arrives later this month. Hoorah!  Nothing like waiting until the last minute for these things...

Linus Quilt

So, my friend who is a longarm quilter (the lovely Lana at Bewitching Stitching) was having some trouble with her machine's splangebracket* and after it was replaced, wanted to test it out on something which didn't matter too much, if there were still problems (rather than a customer quilt).  So I pulled out a small, not very interesting, Project Linus top for her to experiment on. Luckily, it was working fine, so now I have a small quilted PL quilt to add binding to and donate. 

*or some part I don't remember the name of.