Stash use report for April

The month of April has gone without much work done with the sewing machine. I have not been lazy, just busy with stitches on the needles and embroidery instead of using fabric from my stash. This linen bag is all I used fabrics for:

It took 1 m of linen for the bag and 1 m cotton for the lining, totalling 2 m. The good news is that I didn't buy any fabric in April. From the beginning of the year my stash statistics look more impressive: 41.8 m used, 10.6 m bought.

I had some business at the local hospital a couple of weeks ago, and I finally took three preemie quilts to the Children's Ward. I had finished them some years ago but for some reason never took them there earlier. I only had pictures of the two pretty ones:

This one was made during the Sew, Mama, Sew! Quilting Month in 2008.

The other one is hand pieced and tied. The third one was my attempt on disappearing ninepatch, a nice pattern but the fabrics could have been more carefully chosen. Anyway, the nurse at the ward was very happy to have them. All my children are born at this hospital, and both sons were preemies. At that time there was no children's ward.

Spring is here, the days are long already. The sun rises just after 5 in the morning and sets around 9.30 in the evening. Every day is about five minutes longer, it makes more than half an hour every week. Yesterday I took a picture of the last snow:

This is where it had been pushed all winter to clear the driveway. This morning there was only a handful left. Soon Mr. Kotkarankki will have to continue his project there.

Pinwheel quilt and green thoughts

This is the pinwheel baby quilt with the checkered binding you voted for a while ago. I sat and waited for my father-in-law when he was having his feet seen to; and watched one episode of Heartbeat to finish the hand sewing part. The light blue shirts are not all the same colour, but when re-using material this can be accepted. (British series with village life and old times are my favourite.) Notice the little flowers, I have never before used embroidery in my quilts. The white squares looked so pale that I tried to cheer them up a little.




I haven't been lazy at all: on Saturday I finally made myself a light shopping bag to be carried with me at all times:

The pattern is a copy of our normal big plastic bags. Today I used it for the first time and carried 5 one litre jars, vegetables, apples, bread, cheese, meat and biscuits. It was very comfortable to carry. I used French seams because the material is synthetic, and I put a green bias binding at the top because a) I had a suitable length available and b) I'm going green with this bag.

It folds this small, and I will make a little pouch from the rest bit between the handles to keep the bag this small in my shoulder bag.

Which binding?

Now you have a chance to express your opinion and tell me which fabric I should use for the binding of the new baby quilt I have almost made:




The options are from the left: A) plaid like in the Friendship Star, B) blue floral print on white, or C) white floral print on blue. D) would be the heart print used in the pinwheels and for the backing. "I like it" will be a reasonable enough argument, feel free to comment. If you convince me, I may follow your recommendation!



This was the situation last night. I hope to finish the quilt tomorrow. Everything I used was from stash!

Grandmother's garden was kind of ready stitched when I started thinking what it will look like when I have washed the quilt and the cotton batting shrinks like I've known all the time it will do. And to avoid a catastrophy (in a small scale, but personally a disaster) I decided to quilt around each middle hexagon (where the pin is) between the zigzag lines three rows apart.






That means over 200 hexagons if I counted correctly. And that means that I should have started quilting around the blocks to emphasize their form instead of trying to make less and end up doing something that may be described as "interesting" or "a personal view". And at least as much work.

So, help me, which binding for the little pinwheel quilt?

Working for my fabric diet

This is something I found on Saturday when I was digging in my boxes:





And after a little thinking I did this on Monday:





And some of this, too.




Later I will show you what became of it. These were leftover pieces from my Friendship star quilt.

Yesterday I had wonderful news from my daughter Kaija. She won the second price in a big bookbinding competition. You can read more here. I'm proud to have a talented daughter, and especially glad that her talent is in her hands as well as in her mind and her heart.

My new book and new plans

This is the new book Kaija brought me for by coming birthday:




There is only very little English text in the book, but the pictures are inspiring and beautiful, and there are drawn instructions in the "How to make" part of the book. I already started making one bag, or my version of it. I just had to start, because I bought this at the fair:

"This" means now the floral print at the bottom. I got the book before we went to the fair, and when I saw the print I knew I could use it with some natural coloured linen for my favourite bag from the book.

I know I have not finished the second tactile book I have been working on, and of course there is the hand quilting to do. (Household chores don't count, because I keep doing most of them, and the rest can wait.) Sometimes a girl just needs to do something else instead of the things she should be doing. And so do I, in case I don't count as a girl any more, being a mother of three grown up children. If there is a sewing/crafting person out there who always finishes one project before starting any new ones, please come forward. You must be a very special person!

And, by the way, my pinwheel block was on the Sew, Mama, Sew! blog today, in the bottom row of a group of nine blocks.

Pinwheel Baby Quilt

A few weeks ago I found an interesting blog with a very appealing name: Sew,Mama;Sew! There is a Quilting Month going on in February and I joined a couple of hundreds of quilters. This Monday the last "block of the week" was announced, and it was the Pinwheel. I had never made Pinwheels, although it is a simple block. Then I remembered my stash of baby prints I bought for the premature babies' quilts a couple of years ago. I had lots of 8 cm squares ready cut, so I just cut some more and started sewing.






The blocks turned out to be too small (the extra seam allowances because I made triangles), and so I added sashings and frames.







These detail pictures I took when the sun wasn't shining, so the colours are too blue. But I did manage to get the corners almost perfect.

This picture shows the true colours. I had to take the picture at an awkward angle in order to not block the sun. I didn't feel like going out to take great pictures, because I'm having a flu and cold shivers, sneezes and a red, runny nose. Today is not worse than yesterday, so maybe I'm getting better. I promise to stay on this side of the screen and wash my hands a lot.

The quilt shall now remain a WIP because I don't have the right kind of wadding (thin) to finish it just yet. Lucky me, I still have lots and lots of hand quilting to do in Grandmother's Garden. And if I look carefully, there might be some useful sewing to do as well, like replacing worn-out hang tabs on towels. Which reminds me of 12 hang tabs waiting to be sewn on place on the 12 linen towels I made in the eighties. My godmother gave me the linen just before our wedding, and I was supposed to embroider my initials on them as well. About ten years ago I decided I don't need to embroider the initials because it is not something I enjoy doing (lack of practice). But I still have perfectly good towels from my grandmother and her sister and my other grandmother, and the ones my mother made for me and the ones I made (only one has a hole, it's the one I made at school and it has been used longer). But some day, when I feel like it, I'll make the pretty blue towels ready. Only, the unused linen will be so difficult to mangle crease-free...