Sewing with Christine

I have been squeezing in a bit of sewing here and there this week, including an evening of sewing with Christine last night.  Earlier in the week, I put together four more Foothills blocks --this quilt is being made with my husband's cast off shirts. The light green fabric in the block below actually came from one of my shirts. 

I am making these blocks by making parts--hour glass, HST and flying geese units and then putting the parts together into blocks.  In the original Foothills quilt, some of the blocks were not perfect and this added interest to the quilt.  We don't know if these were intentional or mistakes...  The block below was not intentional--I only noticed the flying geese all flying in the same direction after the block was assembled.  I decided to leave it that way for a couple of reasons...the yellow fabric frays easily and I thought the geese would fall apart if I tried to take it apart and I like the little surprise of finding a slightly different block or two in the final quilt.

If I was making a quilt from quilting cottons, I am not sure that I would combine these colours and fabrics together, but when working with a bin of shirts, I make it work.

I like the stripes going in different directions too.

I have 17/25 blocks done now and a few parts made for the next few blocks. I would like to have this quilt finished for the London Friendship Quilter's Guild show in October.  Only 8 more blocks to go!

Two blocks are missing from this picture...

Baby #2 received her quilt in the mail this week. The quilt is folded in half in this picture.  I'm glad that she likes it! (her grandma told me that she did!)

When Christine and I got together to sew for a few hours last night, she worked on a baby quilt and I worked on some 5" blocks for a swap that we are doing at the Elgin Piecemakers Guild.  I need to make 24 5" blocks each month and the first set is due at our September meeting.  I would like to get ahead of the game and get a few months' worth of blocks done and in zip lock bags, ready to swap.

We are using neutrals in this quilt--white, beige, brown, grey, and black.  I am digging into my stash to cut up bits and pieces of fabric that are in my scrap bins and in my bins in the colours we are to use.  I spent some time cutting out squares and strips last night and then sewing some blocks together.

I'm using this bin to keep all of my pieces together in one spot.  I have 18 blocks sewn so far.  This is a good project to work on when I just have 15 minutes to sew.

My husband and I have been working on re-doing this entrance to our backyard after the new fence was put in. A lot of the dirt from the post holes ended up on top of our rocks and flagstones so we had to dig everything out, wash the stones, re-lay to flagstones and put the stones back in place.  It looks great now!  We have to adjust our gate to make it fit the new opening which is a little bit narrower than the old opening.  We are still working on the flagstone path at the other side of the yard...  This is an all summer project.