WIP Wednesday - progress in all sorts of directions

Its been another bits and pieces week.

"Pink Pizzazz" (the quilt I am working on for our quilting group) was pinned today after our monthly meeting. No one rushed me for it and so I will quilt it myself. Its pretty small so won't take long. We decided that we would give it to our Neighbourhood Centre who run fundraising events for Breast Cancer research. We don't mind if it is used as a raffle prize or given to someone in need. They can choose.

"Going Green"  I also got pin basted today at the rooms assisted by 3 of the women there. I sure did appreciate their help. Pinning can take ages! I didn't stop to take a photo of the process. You will have to trust me on this

Hexies - have been beavering away making more of these. I now have 18 flowers made plus another little bag of basted hexies not sewn into flowers plus a heap more pinned. I found a website during the week that had a calculator on it for working out how many hexies you need for quilts.  Its here on CDDesigns.com You can select the dimension of the hexies and the dimensions of the quilt. Tells you how many half hexies you need too. Problem with it was that it told me if I want a queen bed quilt I am going to need 1523 hexies. ATM once I have put together all the hexies I have pinned, basted and sewn together that comes to about 300 hexies.... so I have a long way to go!! Last night a cut out a pile of hexie papers. I used a free pdf download from here on Love Patchwork and Quilting I have saved the PDF and only print out the page I wanted (1.5" sides) I printed out 10 pages. There are 8 hexies on each page I would use one page as the pattern and load up 5 pieces of scrap paper behind and cut them out together. I wish that there were more than just 8 hexies per page as it wastes a lot of paper but feel that they are more accurate than me tracking around my plastic hexie template. I have quite a pile of hexies cut out ready to pin to fabric.

Scrap Basket
This was probably my biggest achievement for the week. As per Pam, from Hip To Be a Square Podcast, I took before and after photos to document my progress. Here are my scraps both in and out of the basket

 It took me a day and a half to get it all done and one of those days was pretty solid going. It was good to get it all cut up and organised!  You can see how I organise myself in the photo below where my daughter's 2 cats who are visiting this week are Helpingering (that's another Pam phrase) I have my ironing board set up close to the cutting table (usually its over next to my sewing machine and set to a seated level so I can just swing around from my sewing machine to press the seams as required) I iron a pile of scraps and then cut them up to size. I have a number of shoe boxes, one for each of the sizes I cut to, set up along the back of the cutting table (resting on the back of the couch) I can watch tv whilst I cut although to be honest I listened to a number of podcasts and radio plays (lots on the bbc website if you are wanting to listen to good stuff) and also an audio book.

I cut my scraps into units from 1.5 - 5" (going up in .5" increments), 6.5"  squares and strips and 10" squares. I also make bricks in some sizes (rectangles where the length is 2 x width - .5" Good for making flying geese units)

See an empty basket. I put all the scraps back into it after I tipped them out for the earlier photo - 

In resorting some of my boxes of scraps and other bits and pieces as part of this scrap cutting I found some left over hexies from my QAYG hexie quilt I made 9 years ago. I had cut them out but not used them and was very pleased to to find that they were the right size... that's saved me some cutting (and is using up some scraps. Bonus)

What have you  been working on this week?