2018 - a round up

Sewing has had to take a back seat this year, so my list of finishes is not great. I have managed to complete a quilt for Project Linus and have another top ready to quilt in the new year. I wrote a couple of the tutorials for the BOM club and have added two project tutorials to this website and finished various other bits and pieces. There has also been time to learn some new techniques at Leeds MQG (crumb blocks and a triple Drunkard's Path) which I might put to use in 2019.

There has been a bit of garment sewing (but no photos) and a couple of trips to shows which gave me the chance to meet up with online friends, as well as succumbing to the usual shopping opportunities these events offer.

There was a late addition to the fabric stash - I won some gorgeous Japanese style fabrics just before Christmas in a giveaway from P&Q Magazine on Instagram.

I've also inherited a couple of sewing items - a Victorian style cotton reel stand that used to belong to my Grandma and a Bernina Minimatic sewing machine that was my Mum's. The bobbin stand has been put to use, but I'm now keeping an eye out in charity shops for wooden cotton reels to display on it. Unfortunately, the Bernina will need some attention before I can use it as it will sew a few stitches and then the needle stops going up and down, but I'm hoping this will be fixable.

I hoping for more sewing time in 2019 and first on my list is finishing a quilt for a great nephew who appeared in the summer and is still waiting for his quilt (though I don't think he minds).

A flurry of finishes

My sew-jo seems to have returned and there has been quite a bit of sewing going on in December. First is one of those annoying secret sewing projects that I can't show as it was made for a Secret Santa swap that has been delayed to January.

Moving quickly onto things I can show, I've been working my way through a Block of the Month this year and December's BOM was a 3D Santa. I decided to scale down the pattern and make a tree decoration sized Santa (standard sized visiting cat shown for scale).


Fortunately, I had a spare block from one of the other months and so I was able to use this to complete a quilt top that will probably go to Project Linus. There have been a variety of blocks, but using a limited number of fabrics and adding a narrow dark border to the blocks has brought the various patterns together.

Back in February, I started a FPP challenge for 2018 and I managed to get this completed with a day or two to spare. The original challenge was for the curved pattern, but I made an additional panel using a simplified straight line design and then used the two panels to make a bag for my quilting rulers. I used fusible Bosal R foam to give the bag some structure, but it doesn't want to stay fused so I might try to unfuse it to give a more even effect with the quilting.


After this flurry of activity, I think I need some time tidying up my sewing stuff which seems to have taken over the kitchen table.