Saturday 5 January 2013

Sand, strings and squares

And here's the sand, photo taken by my son on a beach near Dargerville, Bayley's Beach I think.  What amazing colours - but then with my love of orange I would think that.....


The strings on the hanger have been tugging at me lately, these are the ones I cut with a strip of plastic before the days of proper marked rulers, they are 3cm which makes it a bit awkward for cutting more now, but I solved the problem by using one of the Qtools Cutting Edges - a repositionable [I didn't think this was a word, but it's there on the wrapping!] strip of plastic which I applied on the underside of the ruler, so when I slide the ruler towards the fabric it stops with the correct measurement against the  pretty (orange) strip.  I hope you follow that ......

I decided to take a random bunch of strips and join end to end, a la jelly roll -


Quite an eclectic mix, so I joined a whole lot then bottom to top I sewed into a strip of two and then into a strip of four - which I then cut into squares, put into some order and thought about borders.


The two squares that were the odd ones out I put into the corners, decided this was too pale, so

I beefed it up a bit with the blue and it's another for the hospital.  I think this technique has possibilities using different length or width of strips,

Some while ago I showed some plaid squares I bought in the UK on my last trip, and one day the mood was right, so I started joining them, at random - just any two had to be of different value - until I had my nine patches then I played with them on the design wall with alternate squares from my plaid stash


More jiggling or juggling was required -


A few more tweaks and on went the border


All ready for a gentleman, or his dog, I think!

And talking of tweaking, either you didn't notice, or were too polite to tell me, but the last top I showed - the one using the left overs from the Marriage Quilt - had a mistake.  I kept looking at the last two photos on my blog and something wasn't right - then I picked up the quilt and, sure enough, the bottom row was on the wrong way!

The blocks were supposed to follow the colours diagonally - and now they do!

And as I head off to more stitching, I want to thank you for your comments - and share with you this thought,"Old minds are like old horses: you must exercise them if you wish to keep them in working order." John Adams - not that I'm saying I'm old, it's just something to bear in mind for when that happens!

We'll talk again soon, take care
June

1 comment:

Yvonne said...

You could have fooled me June as I certainly didn't pick the mistake up. In fact had to go several times backwards and forward to see the so called mistake! My impressions are here is another beautiful scrap quilt.

I remember in my early quilting years getting a set of plastic rulers in various widths that were made by someones enterprising husband.

Yvonne