We have a winner!

Mr Random number generator has chosen a winner!

Congratulations to Afquilt who left comment number 92 and won the 10 Low volume Fat Quarter Bundle for Sew Mama Sew Giveaway Day!  I've sent you a mail for your postal address.

Thanks to all for entering.  Apologies to anyone I've not been able to respond to by email.  With over 400 entries it was wonderful to read about everyone's favourite sewing music, TV, sound of the machine humming, birds singing and sound of kids playing. 

This might be the engineer coming out in me but I went ahead and tabulated the responses (Yes I did read every single one and grouped them together as best I could!)  I thought you might be interested to see the breakdown of our likes.

We have 4 people who like to sing while sewing, 6% listen to audio books, 17% like the quiet and rest of us love the radio/music and TV.  The most mentioned TV program was NCIS (my fave!) and we seem to enjoy lots of Crime dramas, Science Fiction, some reality TV and Downton Abbey was mentioned a few times!

Thanks to all for taking part, have a wonderful weekend and congratulations again to Afquilt.  I hope you enjoy your new fabric bundle!

Giveaway Day! 10 Fat Quarters of Low Volume fabric!

It's Sew Mama Sew giveaway day today!  If you are visiting for the first time you are most welcome.  This year I'm joining in the party and giving away this fat quarter bundle of prints.  My first giveaway!  I've picked these guys from the Westwood Acres monthly bundle of low volume fabric that I subscribe to.  There are 5 white based fabrics and 5 warmer fabrics in this bundle, that I hope you will like.

Do you watch TV or listen to music/audio books when you sew?  To be in the draw to win these please leave a comment telling us what you like to watch or listen to!  I love watching NCIS and Person of Interest with Jim Caviezel.  Though I have to confess I'm quite partial to Grimm & Supernatural too!

The giveaway is open until 5pm May 16th and the winner will be chosen by random number generator.   As I live in Ireland the giveaway is open to International shipping so all are welcome!

If you are a no reply blogger please leave your email address so I can get in touch with you later for a postal address.  If I am unable to get in touch with the winner within 3 days I'll choose another winner.  Thank you Sew Mama Sew for hosting another great giveaway day.  Hop on over to their site for more giveaways today!

Friday Finish: Bachelors Walk (my first Modern Quilt design!)

A Friday Finish at long last!  I'm so delighted to share these photos of Bachelors Walk finally Quilted, Bound, Washed and Crinkled!

I was a little nervous sticking it in the washing machine so I threw in three colour catchers.  Just in case!  Then a spin in the dryer, watching the timer, waiting for zero to flash, keeping my fingers crossed  that some of the pleats, I made during quilting, would shrink up and disappear into the never never.  I'm left with one small area of pleated badness but I'm living with it! 

When I asked our Thursday night sewing group how to get rid of pleats I got lots of advice from quilt more, it will come out in the wash, to rip it and redo.  Quilting densely around it helped as when the quilt did its shrinking crinkly thing it reduced the look of the one that was driving me mad.  A few did disappear completely and I'm happy to say I can move onto adding the hanging sleeve without having to go back and rip!

I don't know if you can tell but I'm thrilled to bits with this one and would like to thank all the ladies from our Thursday group for their advice and Claire in particular for helping with the design!

My original idea for this back in January when I was buying fabric was an 80" quilt made up of 4 giant blocks.  I  wanted an edge to edge design.  Well I didn't buy enough fabric and my blocks became a 40" quilt (kinda small!) so I put on a 10" border.

Explaining that I had lost the edge to edge with the border Claire suggested I extend the blue lines into the border.  Genius idea, totally makes the quilt!

Charly taking the opportunity to get my attention to throw the ball!

Thanks also to the advice from you guys on quilting the top.  I had a panicky moment of I'm going to ruin this thing but getting stuck in and the feedback really helped me move on and now its finished!

As you can tell the Irish weather is not the best today!  I hope to take better photos and write this one up as a pattern over the next few weeks.  If anyone is interested in pattern testing please let me know!

I'll be having a giveaway (first ever!) on the blog on Monday 12th May for Sew Mama Sew giveaway party so if you fancy a chance to win a fat quarter bundle of 10 pieces of low volume fabric from Westwood Acres check back here and visit Sew Mama Sew to see what other bloggers are giving away!

But for now it's happy dance time so linking up with Crazy Mom Quilts and
And as this is one of my Finish-A-Long goals to the Littlest Thistle!

WIP Wednesday: Bee Blocks & Binding

Happy May!  We've just had a bank holiday for May day (astronomically and traditionally the start of summer, though weather wise not one bit!)  May is the month I get to be Queen Bee for Stash Bee Hive #10 and Global Scrap Bee.  

These are the blocks I chose.  The flower block is called Spring Blossom from Charise Creates Vintage Sew-A-Long.  She has the most beautiful blocks on her web page and featured this flower block on Sew Mama Sew where she shared the template and tutorial.  For global scrap Bee, the block I chose for this month is Clover & Violet's Low Volume Scrappy Star.  I love how this block looks.

For Stash Bee, you have to make the block from the tutorial showing how you did it step by step and point out any areas of difficulty or any changes you want to make along the way.  If you want to see how I made this one, the post is at Stash Bee Hive#10.  Stash Bee runs from January to November and opens to new members every year if you interested in joining a Bee!

Global Scrap Bee is the first Bee I joined and it came from Plum and June's summer blog hop for new quilt bloggers last year.  It is a scrappy Bee so we are making blocks from our scraps and little bits of Stash.  To make the scrappy Star you need a solid or print that reads as solid for the centre and a mixture of prints to make the 4 squares and 8 rectangles.  It's a very scrap friendly block!

Laying them out to play what goes best where is fun and even in a Greek cross shape this would be a cool block to make.

Happy with this layout, I chain pieced the squares on the rectangles to make the star points.  4 going from left to right and 4 from right to left!

 Love this block.  It is really quick to piece!  Just join the rectangles to make star points.

 Then in rows.

Finally rows together.

And voila, one scrappy Star block!

Isn't she pretty?

So that's my Bee duties for May for these 2 done and dusted.  Back to other WIP's now like binding!

I'm nearly finished my Bachelors Walk quilt and am hoping to enter it into the Irish Patchwork Society's exhibition titled Explorations.  My quilting isn't great yet and I have pleats to fix in some of the straight line quilting areas but nothing ventured, nothing gained! 

I haven't invested in wonder clips yet for holding down the binding.  At the moment I'm using 2 packets of hair clips. 2 sides hand sewn down, 2 more to go.  Then a label and a hanging sleeve. I'll get there eventually!
Linking up to

WIP Wednesday - Designing Paper Pieced Stars

Seeing as I won't make the deadline for the triangle-a-long this weekend, I figured, as it's a Bank Holiday here this weekend, to try and make some headway on my baby Medallion quilt.  The last round planned for this are some stars and 4 hearts in the corners.  The whole design when finished should look like this:

Yes, it's very busy and I hope very colourful. I'm not even sure how to begin toning it down if I ever wanted to!

I scaled up the 3" hearts in the inner border to 4" and 6" for the last two borders. I've been playing with star shapes trying to figure out what will work best for the quilt.  The last border will be 6" and my original design above had a fat star with 6 points.  There are lots of ways to make a 6 pointed star, EPP diamonds, piecing with triangles or inset seams but to try it out quickly I decided to paper piece. 

After a bit of trial and error I came up with a fat 6 pointed star and a skinnier 5 pointed star using both Quilt Assistant and EQ7 which now runs on my old Macbook.

Paper piecing was quick and I think I can get 2 stars from each 10" layer cake so not too wasteful of fabric.  The fabric I'm using for the Stars is a layer cake from Me and My Sister with Kona snow for the background.

With only a few seams it went together very quickly and what's great about paper piecing is all the points are protected, especially nice when making star shapes!

 So now I've got 2 stars made, I need to make a decision.

I'm leaning towards the second one on the bottom.  I'm hoping when pieced together they will make a lovely chain around the quilt to finish it off.  What do you guys think?  There'll be 40 stars in total so 39 more to go!

Linking up to

Modern Irish Bee April Blocks - wonky log cabin

The last of April's Bee Blocks were for Anna for the Modern Irish Bee hosted on the Modern Quilt Guild of Ireland blog page.  Anna chose a wonky log cabin block with a fussy cut piece off centre.
 

Pulling out brightly coloured scraps intermingled with low volume pieces was great fun.  Don't expect a tidy worktable making these blocks.  They are a great way to play with fabric scraps and really good fun!

I even managed to use the last of the scraps I received with this pincushion from Rosie as a swap item in the blocks.  So far the fabrics that Rosie sent me have found a way into all my Modern Irish Bee blocks and my Medallion quilt so all our group so far is benefiting from Rosie's kindness.  Love that!

Who would have thought wonky would be tricky?  It's been a while since I made a wonky log cabin block and I did find my first attempt turned out more square than wonky!

I think I got it on my second attempt though!  Much happier with this one.  Both are winging their way to Anna today.  The tutorial for this is by Aneela Hoey at Comfort Stitching if you want to give it a try!

Linking to

Design Wall Monday

 Guess what I've been doing?

Yup, I've been trimming half square triangles.  Somehow I managed to find myself in 3 Bee's overlapping for a good part of this year.  Completely unintentional.  I put my name in for a Bee and didn't think I was in time so joined another.  A week later I got the email saying welcome!  Kind of like bidding on 2 eBay items at the same time!
 
Still, it's been manageable so far and I've gotten to make some lovely blocks and amazingly I've found myself Queen Bee on 2 of them for May!  So it's been kinda busy here this month getting ready for that and making the blocks for April.

This block, chosen by Robin Sue Quilts for global Scrap Bee is called the Colorado Beauty and if the pinwheel spins the other way it's called the Lucky Pieces.  Funny how they get their names.  It's made up of just 4 coloured prints 4" square with a background fabric, trimmed to 3.5" as a HST and sewn together in rows.  A really fun quick make!  I made mine in yellow;  must be the the spring feeling as almost all I'm making at the moment has lots of yellow in it!  Some of the other members made it in pink and grey.  The grey looks really good for this block. 

So the second Bee bock was made last Friday evening, just as well as the weekend got away from me completely.   Trip to emergency room  - all is ok now - took up most of Saturday and then yesterday morning Charly the JRT killed a baby blackbird in the garden   I don't think I would have been able to work on this owl block after that. The blackbird parents were dive bombing her as she was shaking the poor little thing, Wilbur hopping around barking not knowing what was going on and me yelling for Gordon was quite eventful.  Eventually she dropped the chick, big happy head on her with feathers sticking out of her mouth and came inside.   So before all that happened, I put together a fussy cut sleepy owl block.

Nela from Stash Bee hive 10 chose a fussy cut log cabin style for our April block. I chose to use a scrap of fabric on hand from some quilt backing.  Nela's tutorial was to frame it in white with 1.5" strips and make a log cabin in bright crayon colours to frame it.

The only colour I struggled to find in my stash was purple.  I think I might just have to go and buy some purple fabric!

So this is state of the design wall (flannel sheet!) at the moment.  Test blocks for my turn as Queen Bee as well as some of my WIP's.  Looking kind of busy - a reflection of how the month has been! 

Linking up to Design wall Monday and