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Last year at Festival of Quilts, I attended a talk about Sylko threads and since then I have been on the look out for the wooden reels. The original shop cabinets can be quite expensive and so I've been searching for something that would be a bit nicer than the current cardboard boxes in which my reels are currently stored, but more affordable than the vintage cabinets.
I spotted a wooden box in charity shop for only £2 that had potential. It had a logo and some paint stains, but these could be removed by sanding. I found an image of the Sylko logo online which I was able to adapt to make it a suitable size and colour for the box. Adding a £1 bottle of glue, a £1.50 can of spray varnish and a couple of hours of my time resulted in a more stylish storage solution for at least some of my Sylko reels.
I said last month that I had finished all the machine pieced blocks for my Wonderland sampler quilt and only had to applique the EPP shapes onto the background square - this turned out not to be the case. After completing the applique, I went to layout the blocks and realised I was four short for my on point layout.
I was originally planning a 8x8 square layout and so had chosen 64 blocks to make from the book. However, I changed my mind and decided to set the blocks on point which required 68 blocks, but I had not updated my notes. After looking through the book for inspiration, I made 2 extra machine pieced blocks and 2 extra EPP blocks. One bonus of not being able to count, was that I was able to include some hidden cats in one of the extra blocks.
The next stage is to decide on a layout and check my calculations for the triangles at the ends of each row.
