Today's stint

Writing this while someone is snoozing under his quilt! This afternoon I finished quilting the border of the Autumn leaves quilt. When I laid it out on the floor I thought oh dear not a good choice of border fabric but having gone down just now to take a photo I'm happier with it - perhaps it looks better in artificial light.

Quay Quilters' Black and White Challenge

Tonight was Quay Quilters' Christmas meeting - lots of tasty nibbles and a black and white challenge with many (for us) entries. Mine was my black and white bag.

Babes in the Wood

Still on the finishing front I've been adding a border sew and flip quilt as you go to my Autumn quilt. I made the first of these blocks as extras for an internet swap 10 years ago, then made a 3 by 4 block quilt for a challenge with a size limit then added and made more blocks to make it 5 blocks by 6 and now I've added two inner borders mitred and a final log cabin type set border which I'm quilting by stitching down the two marrow yellow stripe repeats. No tacking - it's glue basted. As I've been having shoulder problems from hauling and binding such big heavy quilts I'm limiting myself to a side at a time with exercise breaks. I've also got to finish 500 + pages of small print Doris Lessing's "Golden Notebook" for a week on Thursday. It's very dense so it's hard to speed up my reading.

Oast Quilters

Oast Quilters here in Kent had our AGM on Saturday followed by tea and mince pies. Frances who is a physiotherapist took us through some exercises appropriate for quilters which did us good and we were noticeably livelier at tea. As well as a challenge of which the theme was "Circus", for me the most enjoyable feature of this this meeting is a larger than usual Show & Tell. Crab & Winkle always put on a good show all of us except Mary who is very very busy with job and family had quilts to view but I post some photos made by other members here.

Bags

I've already written about the the Crab & Winkle sewing day last week but didn't post a photo of the baby quilt Marion showed us which she and her daughter made for a friend of Sally's.Very bright and colourful. Meanwhile I have finished my black and white bag made from a lovely and staightforward pattern by Sally Ablett in Popular Patchwork. It's quilt as you go so no linings to wrestle with and the gusset is tidy too as a square is cut out of the bottom. My bagmaking to date has not been very impressive and I think these two are a big improvement - intended for the Oast Showcase next year either on sales table or for a bag tombola. Encouraged I plan to work through some more patterns especially as I keep buying them

Kaleidoscope

This 6" block was made using Marti Michell's Kaleidoscope ruler which shows what size strips to cut for each finished size, then the kaleidoscope pieces and finally can be used to cut the triangles for the corners.

Sixty degree ruler

There are lots of versions of these which generate isosceles triangles with all sides the same length and cutting from a 3.5" strip will produce a triangle with a height of 3" but sides of 4" + I think! They are good for charm quilts and combining to make hexagons or to put with hexagons to facilitate straigt line sewing and whoops I have no photos except of a hexagon quilt.