Wip Wednesday

I've had a nasty cold for the last 12 days. It has meant that one way and another I haven't gotten my WIPs or stash reports written for a week or 2 but you get that.

This last 2 week I have been working on a number of different things.

I have got the top of the last of the 5 baby quilts that I need to make put together. I have one pinned ready to quilt but have to make backs for the other 4 before I can pin and quilt them all. They are all variations of the Sparkle Quilt by Missouri Star

I have also been working on some Christmas table runners for our Handmade With Love stall at the Christmas in July Craft fair. Some of the fabric came from Handmade with Love and some from my own stash. I had found the pattern on Pinterest and adapted it to suit me. The pattern had it made from a charm pack but I cut mine from yardage for the most part plus some 5" squares in my scraps. I ended up making 5 table runners to the pattern. I photographed them before I sewed them together...

From left over hst I made another 2 table runners. I also made 4 log cabin blocks from the scraps that I put together into 8th mat. 

At HML this week I was able to get 3 of the table runners finished off. I hope to get the remaining ones done this week, or at least before I go away on the 22nd. I forgot to take photos of the finished ones before I handed them over. Silly me! I might take some photos when I go over with my other goodies for the stall on Saturday.

My sister asked me to make her grandson who starts school next year, a special pencil case for her to give him for Christmas. She had seen pictures of the ones I had made with the pencils on the pencil case and thought it would be great for him to have one with super hero pencils. The fabric she sent me really wasn't going to work on narrow pencils, given the size of the superhero's on fabric.

 I found a picture of another "pencil" pencil case on Pinterest but the website was in German and the translation ap on my computer didn't make it much clearer.

 There wasn't a full set of instruction on the site anyway from what I could tell.  I was able to sort of work it out and ended up making 2 of them, using up all the spiderman fabric she had sent me. (she sent me a selection of 6 fabrics but they were only 10cm cuts). It was a bit frustrating not knowing exactly how the designer had gone about making them.

The pattern I found was here. As I said - in German! Today looking at the website I realised that there was a link to the original tutorial on the pencil case ... in English. The tutorial is on www.GwennyPenny.com here. 

I contacted Gwen to find out about paying the reasonable licence fee and she kindly agreed to waive it for our group since we sew for charity. It was very kind of her.

The tutorial is great and it will be much easier to make them that way than how I did them.

It was a really exciting day today for our patchwork group. We took delivery of our new longarm machine, which was obtained via a grant we were given. The people we bought it from delivered it, set it up and then ran a workshop on how to use it. Its great to have. I have a couple of quilts I want to get done on it asap. One has a very definite deadline. My friend Lindi (who has a much younger brain than me) listened intently and has promised to help me when I do my first quilts (its good to have younger friends with a retentive brain)

 Lindi and the shop owner during the setting up time

Lindi on the Longarm.