Scraptastic Tuesday - Winners in February

Hello again!

Remember my Blueberry Park mini apple cores?  

Well I hand stitched all those little apple cores together, trimmed the panel square, quilted about a quarter inch either side of the seam and added some mustard linen to the edge.  The back is more of the mustard linen and an exposed chunky yellow zip with cute circle zip pull (meant for a jacket but I cut off the zip stop at the end).  

And now I have a finished cushion to enjoy...

My son says it reminds him of ravioli - so my Ravioli Cushion it is then! 


My little bit of sunshine in my sewing room no matter what the weather!

And now its time to award the prizes for the February Scraptastic Tuesday link up.

InLinkz.com

A huge thank you to our generous sponsors for providing the following prizes which will have been awarded randomly among the record 98 people who joined us, well done all of you:

• Fat Quarter Shop - $25 gift certificate: #6, Indiannadreams on Instagram

• Sew Sisters Quilt Shop - $25 gift certificate: #40, Allison from Instagram

• Sew Me a Song - $20 gift certificate: #48, The Lilac Cat on Flickr

• Fluffy Sheep Quilting - a €20 (20 Euro) gift certificate: #62, Sandra, Musings of a Menopausal Melon

• Green Fairy Quilts - $25 gift certificate: #16, Sue at Sue Daurio's Quilting Adventure

• Karen Lewis Textiles  - scrap pack: #80, Linda at Flourishing Palms

• Mad About Patchwork - a $40 gift certificate, #90, Kat at Kat's Craft

Congratulations to our winners! Leanne will be sending you each an email today to get you connected to your prizes.

Thank you for joining Leanne from She Can Quilt and I, and for sharing so much scrappy inspiration. Please plan to join us again on the second Tuesday in March - on March 8, 2016.

So who is the lucky winner of the Welsh Blanket Pattern by Mary Emmens?

Thank you all for joining in the giveaway for this fabulous pattern by Mary Emmens

I ran Mr Random Number Generator and he said that Michelle Yvonne won!  I shall be passing your details onto Mary so she can send you your prize!  

And I'll be looking be looking forward to seeing that Ultramarine, Cheddar and Lipstick Welsh Blanket Caernarfon quilt you will be making for your DH!  Please let me know when you have finished....

And perhaps I should let you know that Mary has been working on the next Welsh Blanket Quilt St David's Cross!  And it is gorgeous too of course 

as you can see in  this diagram but you really should go and have a look here  and see it in fabric!  

Oldest UFO finished!

This is the oldest quilt I have started and not finished!  

Well to be more accurate part of it is!

I started making the EPP rosestar blocks way back in March 2012, using the EPP tutorial by Clare aka selfsewn.   I made about fourteen and Lucy made one for me too!

Then I decided I could not make a whole quilt of them!  I just don't enjoy EPP enough and then there would be the boring bits inbetween too. It just wasn't going to happen.

So I started combining them with these blocks.    These are two of my favourites ...

When I added them to the background fabric I spaced them out more and added these - which I took from Jen Kingwell's Georgetown on my mind pattern.

And ended up with this huge top!  

It seems to have stayed at this stage for a long while.   I couldn't decide how to quilt it!

But now I am quilting in the ditch for the blocks and doing random FMQ in the background!

It is a huge and heavy quilt for me to quilt on my domestic machine so thank goodness for that Horn table I got last year!  It makes such a difference having my machine set in!

I have been doing a little bit of quilting everday for over a week now and I'm pleased to say....

....it is finished!  

I should have tidied up a bit!

and a panoramic slice across the quilt - playing with the things my camera can do...

Sigh!  I'm really quite pleased with this!  Not quite sure what to call it - working title was Vintage Circles - anybody think of something better?

I'll be linking this up to FAL2016 when the time comes!  

This one is on my FAL2016 list here

Scraptastic Tuesday - February link up

[Giveaway post still going here!]


Here we are in February already!

I am definitely feeling the need of a bit of sunshine - can you tell?

While trying to finish two things that needed finishing I started two new totally unplanned things !  What is that all about?  

Well I did have a cute wee applecore acrylic template and still have lots of Karen's blueberry park scraps so the two sort of went together....  Love those colours - they could even be my favourites!  And I'll be hand piecing them together as they are just too fiddly to machine stitch - I did try a couple but didn't really enjoy it.  

I'm stitching them into rows and then joining the rows.  All hand stitching now and that is so much more relaxing.

Just what I needed to brighten my day!

This will be no bigger than a cushion cover I think - unless I go completely mad and decide it should be a quilt...?

Well it is time to show Leanne and I what scrappiness you have been up to....

InLinkz.com

A huge thank you to our generous sponsors for providing the following prizes which will be awarded randomly among those of you who link up.

• Fat Quarter Shop - $25 gift certificate

• Sew Sisters Quilt Shop - $25 gift certificate

• Sew Me a Song - $20 gift certificate

• Massdrop - tba

• Fluffy Sheep Quilting - a €20 (20 Euro) gift certificate

• Green Fairy Quilts - $25 gift certificate

• Karen Lewis Textiles  - scrap pack

• Mad About Patchwork - a $40 gift certificate

Please join Leanne from She Can Quilt and I by linking up a blog post or flickr or instagram photo sharing a scrappy project, in progress or finished, or your thoughts on dealing with your scrap mountain:

• You don't have to have joined us before, everyone is welcome.

• One link per person, and it will be your entry into the random draw for the prizes. It is the same link up here and at  Leanne's blog She Can Quilt  - so you only need to link up on one of our blogs.

• You can link up from your blog, instagram or flickr, but you have to link up to be entered in the prize draw.

• Please visit at least a few of the links, they are very inspiring, and leave comments too as everyone loves to connect. 

• Use the Scraptastic Tuesday button and invite your friends to join us too. Please share our button, or a link or the hashtag #scraptastictuesday in your linked post or photo.

• The link is open until next Monday night at 10:00 pm MST. We will announce the winners next Tuesday. 

• If you have trouble linking up, let me or  Leanne   know and we will get you sorted.

InLinkz.com

An InLinkz Link-upSew Me a Song

You are waiting for one bus...

.....and then three come all at once!

You know the phrase, and so it happens to be with #welshblanket quilts for me!

I saw the gorgeous quilt on IG that @maryemmens had made way back in November I think.  She was calling for pattern testers.

Now I happen to have 'a thing' about Welsh Blankets!  I have several and love them because you get one pattern on one side and then on the other side you get the same patttern but in reverse colours!   Plus they are great to use and wash well.

It had been a plan of mine to make a quilt inspired by one so when I saw Mary had done the maths you couldn't stop me volunteering to make it!

I started using what I had in my stash - it was coming up to Christmas so a red/white colour scheme seemed the obvious one!

This quilt is the result

And here is the back....

But then online I saw a colour scheme I loved of a real blanket !   I had to make another and decided to use my pal Karen Lewis' Allotment fabrics!

Having made the top I had the crazy idea of doing it proper #welshblanket style and putting the reverse colours on the back!  At the same time Karen asked if she could take it to the Stitches show in February!  

Happy Day!

Karen provided the 'backing fabrics' and I made my third #welshblanket top!  

And then came the tricky bit ....how to put them together back to back.

Now if I had started out with this plan I would have made each square Quilt-as-you-go and built it up that way but by now I had two completed tops!

Never one to let a tricky situation get the better of me I decided I'd machine stitch baste the white one onto the wadding - one layer less to worry about shifting around.

Next I pulled out the stitching in my dark top so that I had rows again.  I pin basted the middle row as well as I could onto the middle row of the white top, matching seams where I could.  I quilted it leaving a margin at either long edge.

Next I used that unquilted margin to join the next row - only the dark top rows were joined together at this stage.  It was a bit fiddly just catching the dark side but possible with that wide unquilted margin.

 I smoothed out the newly attached dark row, pin basted it matching seams with the white top - ok it wasn't perfect but a lot closer than it would have been if the tops were basted together whole.  I quilted this row.

I repeated the process for the other row!

I would be lying to say that they match perfectly but well enough that a bit of trimming and jiggling here and there meant I could bind and finish this quilt.

If the quilt police are out it would probably arouse a bit of criticism but I'm hoping they are overwhelmed by the fact that I even tried and did as well as I have!

Tempted to have another go?  I just might be!  But I'd definitely go straight for QAYG in blocks!

Now if you love this pattern as much as I do there is some rather good news because Mary has agreed to a pattern giveaway - just leave a comment below and say which colours you would choose for your welshblanket!  I will pick a winner randomly next Friday!  

Not only that but you can get a 20% discount from Mary's store on payhip using the code NICKY and the price on her Craftsy store will be reduced by 20% until the giveaway closes.  If the winner has bought the pattern then Mary will refund the cost so nothing to lose by buying it now! What are you waiting for? 

I am linking this quilt to Finish-A-Long 2016 

This quilt is on my FAL2016 list here