The Busiest (& wettest) June on Record?

The highlights for me this June were

* Fat Quarterly Retreat in London

* seeing months of planning come together in our Exhibition/Fund Raising day on 21st. 

* handing over the Pippi Quilt to a young girl in need of hope and blessing.

* and seeing my baby girl turn 11, finish out her last year of Primary School and try on her 'big school' uniform!

So many more lovely things happened this month, which are too numerous to mention here.

But I'll leave you instead with my monster mosaic of makes for June (I did make a few other bee blocks in June, but they were for July so I'll pop them into next month's mosaic!).

Linking up with Lily's Quilts Fresh Sewing Day.

A Kaleidoscope Birthday!

There's another birthday girl in my house this week!

My youngest is 11 today!  I decided it was time she got her own sewing machine & accessories, as she is a natural sewer (& at least one of my offspring should carry on my craft, right?)

She was chuffed to bits this morning with the machine (which she has since named 'Hector') and all the notions and fabric she got.

I also had this parcelled up for her:

An embarrassingly long time ago I started a Kaleidoscope QAL with Don't Call Me Betsy!

Nothing went right with this project, from beginning to end!  I lost my mojo with it early on when, after cutting out all the fabric, I realised the template wasn't symmetrical.  But I persisted and got the top made.

I then had to make a pieced back (my nemesis!) which of course wasn't straightforward (I miscalculated!).

But I persisted and got the back made!

When it was finally basted, I sewed a couple of diagonal lines, lost my mojo again, and parked it for about 8 months!

I recently set up my machine to FMQ the Pippi quilt and thought I may as well get this beast fmq'd too, and have a wee FMQ-fest!

Despite a few tension problems, I persisted and got it FMQ'd (can you see the recurring theme?).

Joy oh joy, the worst bit was over!  Just the binding left to go.

Well in true 'nothing going right with this project' style, I had a piece of perfect green fabric left for the binding, and guessing (!!) that it would be enough, I made the binding, sewed it on, and ended up short by about 10"!  Aargghh!

(If any of my students are reading this, this is not how you go about making a quilt!)

But I persisted, fudged together some leftover bits and got the binding finished!  Phew!

This quilt was quite a journey in how not to do things well, but the response from my nature/green loving girl made it all worth it!

Happy Birthday my sweet!  And happy birthday too, to another fabulously talented lady!

Party on!