The Sewing Dilettante

This weekend was the first in a long time that we didn't have visitors or weren't ourselves away, and it was such a luxury to be at home with nothing much to do! We had glorious weather, so we spent a lot of quality family time outside, soaking up the sun. Otherwise, I had zero plans beyond relaxing and recouping from the past few weeks of visiting and entertaining, so I was glad to have some hand sewing at the ready for a cozy evening on the sofa on Saturday. I've been following the  Saturday Night Craftalong  hosted by Lucy of Charm About You on Instagram for a while now but never had the chance to participate, so this seemed like the perfect time to join in with my teeny, tiny hexies . Just for fun, I started sewing them into multi-coloured daisies. When I wound up for the evening, I had a pile of zany and colourful mini flowers. I'm still not quite sure what I'll do with these, but it occurred to me that I might be able to use them in combination w...

After the Frankenblanket episode of 2012, I wasn't sure I'd ever be able to face EPP again. With a couple of years of recovery, however, I find myself ready to take the proverbial plunge and have started a new EPP project, after remembering how much I love hand sewing when I made a fun little baby shower gift for Sarah . Like my last EPP project, this one is also a baby quilt intended for a new bambino of my own, this one due early in November. Unlike the last project, though, this one is a little less ambitious. I'm going to make several large hexie flowers to appliqué on a low volume background. This will then serve as a central panel that will be surrounded by two borders - one narrow, one wide - of complementary fabric. My inspiration comes from Pinterest: How could it possibly go wrong? I'm smarter, more experienced, and more EPP savvy this time around, right? Time will tell, but so far I'm really enjoying cutting and basting the hexies, and I think this...

Much like the Creature assembled by its namesake, Victor Frankenstein, Frankenblanket has slowly but surely taken shape over the past several months in my first (and possibly only!) EPP experiment. Truthfully, I'm being a bit ungenerous in calling this quilt 'Frankenblanket', as Sarah pointed out. The various fabric scraps I scavenged to create the flowers that form the focal point of the quilt actually blended really well together and, unlike Frankenstein's hideous and misunderstood monster, produced a really stunning quilt, if I do say so myself! Hanging over our newly assembled crib! In other ways, though, the Frankenstein comparison remains apt. Like Victor, I dedicated a lot of time, effort, and study to this particular project, with no promise of success. At least, that's the way it seemed! And that's not to mention the pints of blood, sweat, and tears I poured into this predominantly hand-wrought baby quilt. I'm speaking metaphorically in the ca...

Well, it may not be the prettiest quilt I've ever made, but Frankenblanket is slowly taking shape!  I'm really loving all the different colours and patterns in the hexagon flowers, and though I often tend to follow specific patterns and colour schemes in my quilts, I think the variety works really well with the hexie form. You can't really tell from the photos here, but even the white hexies are different, something I worried about at first but which I now see as completely in sync with the randomness of the rest of the quilt!  I had a bit of trouble when I actually started sewing the hexie flowers together into rows. Where I had initially intended to stack them on top of each other in straight lines rather than diagonals, my spatial reasoning and cognitive abilities seemed not to be up for it! And so, I ended up with lovely offset diagonal rows, which I now firmly believe look better than more straightforward up and down stacking (that's my story anyway, and...

Well, I didn't quite manage to finish everything I had intended to this month, but 'almost' is ok with me at the moment! My biggest accomplishment this month is my charm square baby quilt... Pictured with the Sock Monkey made for Baby H by Mrs. L back home in New Hampshire I'm really pleased with how this turned out and can't wait to use it when Baby H arrives! The FMQ worked out really well, despite some teething issues at the start, and, while I wondered initially if I should use a different colour thread for the quilting, I think the cream adds the perfect contrast to the various fabrics without being too glaring or conspicuous.  A close-up of the FMQ and a view of the flannel back I'm going to call it 'Oh, the places you'll go' after one of my favourite Dr. Seuss books. Not just because the bright colours kind of remind me of the vivid illustrations in all of the Dr. Seuss books, or because the FMQ makes me think of winding roads a...

This Saturday, hubby decided he just had to carve a pumpkin for Halloween. This, of course, was no small undertaking .... long was the time spent drawing potential jack o'lantern faces on scrap paper; equally time-consuming was the sketching of the chosen faces on the pumpkin itself (yes... this was a Janus-faced jack o'lantern!); few were the newspaper sheets placed underneath the pumpkin as it was carved; innumerable were the 'oohs' and 'ahs' required once the carving was completed; and infinite was the gratitude and praise expected for the roasted pumpkin seeds produced in the aftermath of the great pumpkin carving.  The pumpkin's 'good' side For the rest of the evening, we sat around breathing the slightly acrid smell of burning pumpkin flesh - a tea candle had to be lit inside the jack o'lantern at all times for full effect, you see - and gorged ourselves on the sweets intended for the trick-or-treaters who never came! I'...

Well, I've survived another chaotic week at work and am looking forward to a fun-filled weekend with a Bee Blessed gathering tomorrow afternoon, a friend from London visiting, and a low-key birthday dinner on Saturday with a few friends. I managed to get a bit of EPP done in the evenings this week but not much else. Nevertheless, here are a few snapshots (literally) of some of the cooler aspects of my week... Hubby got me these super cute Converse earrings for my birthday yesterday.... for some reason, they make me want to sing 'These boots were made for walking'!  Also yesterday, I started the second installment of Cake School. To explain: last Christmas, hubby bought me the gift that keeps on giving... enrollment in a baking class at the local community college! I had been saying that I really wanted to learn how to decorate cakes a little bit better, so he registered me for what he thought was a decorating class. It turned out to be a more traditional baking class...

After a particularly hectic couple of weeks of work, I decided I deserved a little decompression time last week. So, I took a whole afternoon off, plonked myself on the couch and spent a blissful few hours watching daytime tv and working on some long neglected English paper piecing. Several months ago a friend had introduced me to the humble hexagon, and I was hooked, especially as they're so easy to make and so portable. Don't get me wrong, I love my Pfaff, but sometimes I like not having to faff around - excuse the pun - getting it down from the spare room and setting it up to sew. Sometimes I want something I can just whip out of my sewing bag at a moment's notice and work away at to my heart's content with nothing more than a needle, thread, and paper hexagons. Obviously, the urge comes and goes.... in my initial English paper piecing frenzy, I made up ten hexagon 'flowers' with the intention of (eventually) turning them into a quilt for an as-then-unkn...