Scraps, strips and slider

Quite a bit of time spent in the sewing room this week - yippee!  

As usual, while watching TV in the evenings, I've been sewing - still working on the hand quilting of my brights quilt.  (Will have to think of a better name for it.)  When I'm closer to finishing, I will take some photos.  

I made a few more QAYG blocks from strips, and they will look good in a quilt.  I've tried to make single colour blocks, rather than really scrappy multi-coloured.   

          

I spent time sandwiching Azalea's quilt, and had some help thankfully.  My hip is playing up so pinning on the floor was uncomfortable.  Thank you to my helper! I've almost completed the quilting now  - straight lines around each 6" block, in the ditch in the sashing, and meandering around the name block.  Not sure how I will quilt the border - it doesn't need much, just enough to flatten it a little.  I might try free motion quilting cat faces or paws or similar in a flowing design.  I've done daisies and stars and hearts like that before.  Need to extend the repertoire a little. 

      

I bought a super slider some time ago - a super slippery mat which goes over your machine bed and assists in moving the quilt around while quilting.  It has a hole in the centre for the needle to pass through.  I tried it out while free motiong quilting today and really think it didn't make that much difference in moving the quilt.  I will try it when I'm using the walking foot later and see if it makes a difference with that.  Has anyone else tried using a super slider?

While cutting fabric, I thought of a scrap quilt that I want to make.  Bonnie Hunter of Quiltville's Quips and Snips blog has designed a pattern that utilises scraps, which I quite like.  She calls it "Scrappy trip around the world".  https://quiltville.blogspot.com/2005/06/scrappy-trips-around-world.html

I want to make myself one, using some of the scraps I've been cutting over the last long while.  So I tried out the block this week.  Happy enough with it.  Bonnie emphasises that there isn't a need to play matchy-matchy with the fabrics, so I just grabbed six pieces of each of six fabrics from the 2 1/2" squares drawer.  Bonnie's pattern utilises 2 1/2" wide strips that are sewn together and then subcut, and I will try that method as well.  For the time being, sewing all 36 squares together worked fine for me.  (Note the "deliberate" 😀 error in the choice of fabrics?  I was sure that I had six squares of each fabric but realised at the last row, that I had only five pieces of the lilac/purple.  Fortunately it was easy to find something very similar in the scrap drawers.)

This week has been good sewing-wise.  This blog is good to record those achievements so I can say to myself "you've done lots!"

What have my friends been working on?  I love to be inspired by other's craft work.