Penny Sampler Progress

It's been a tough week this week.  I ended up with a sinus infection and a busy work week where we had presentation training.  Turns out I say ahm a lot.  We were videoed and got to see ourselves in action.  Not the most pleasant of experiences!  Now I'm paranoid about ahm... but hopefully that's a good thing and I can break that habit.  So playing catch up this weekend on my Penny Sampler quilt course with Stitched in Color.  There are 3-4 blocks a week so I was anxious to not fall behind.

I got off to a good start but it quickly turned out to be a bit of a challenging weekend too!  First I made my heart block with turn under applique and got fabric show through.  Very tormenting!  And it was looking so sharp and heart shaped too.  So I remade it with fabric backing and no show through but this time around they all turned out puffy!

The heart shape is't as perfect as the first method and I changed from black sketch stitching to white.  Looking at it now I can live with it but straight after the perfect heart shaped first block I was a little disappointed. Not giving up I tried again with blocks number 2 and 3 and thankfully things went better.  I love these two, they are so wintery feeling.

Keeping with the snowy theme for my quilt and realising I'd get show through I stuck with fabric backed applique and figured I'd have to iron them totally flat to get rid of as much puffiness as possible.

There's a lot of work in this block.  Some of the houses have tiny pieces and the background is pieced as well.  In the middle of this the kitchen tap broke and we had to turn off the water from the mains.  So with no water to clean the floor or run the dishwasher and mumbled curses coming from Gordon the two dogs and I stayed well out of the way at the other end of the kitchen and sewed away the afternoon.

I was looking for a snowy feel and I think I got it.  I'm so glad this block is done.  I had to rip out three of the roofs as they weren't horizontal but well wonky.  Ripping out three rounds of sketch stitched, glued applique houses left me muttering under my breath as well.  Next time I'll use twice as many pins!  Finally got there in the end though and my uncle Tony helped Gordon fix the tap so the mains is back on, which means the electric shower and the dishwasher are available again.  Relief!