The past week..... well since Saturday ........................

I am having trouble working out what day it is. With Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Years Day all happening so close together, and the stores being closed some of those days, I am thoroughly confused, and it feels like a weekend, but apparently it is only Wednesday. A lot has happened here since Saturday when 2 friends arrived for an impromptu stayover. (That has lasted for days!!) But much has been achieved. 

Remember the thoughts I had to sew on Christmas Day, but nothing happened? There was this fabric for round baby quilts.

On Sunday it was loaded onto Max, with enough backing fabric and wadding to make 4 quilts. It was fortunate that I had already made some for Miss Billie, and the quilting patterns were already in that project. So the designing was super easy. 

And soon I had these 4 round quilts, ready for binding.

All have received white binding,.......

......which was stitched to the back of the quilt, and then turned to the front and machine sewn down. I decided that they would get lots of washing and needed to be very secure, and I am very happy with how they turned out. As of tonight, all 4 are bound, and 2 are ready for the new baby, and 2 will be kept for baby gifts sometime.

I also posted about my thoughts of sewing these charm squares on Christmas Day, and that did not happen either. After Raylene and Val arrived on Saturday, and then Pat turned up too, we all put in opinions. The squares were too big for the Cow jumped over the moon fabric, and looked out of proportion. The pink squares were left out of the quilt, to keep it a "neutral" quilt, as I don't know the sex of this coming baby.

Raylene has been an angel, and cut all the charm squares into 4, and we added some other whites to them and made 4 patch blocks. These were then sewn into rows, and the feature fabric cut into rows, with some yellow and green sashes added, to make a row by row quilt.

Then we had to choose some borders, and I must say, I love to have such a choice of fabrics here to choose from. Val is an amazing "chooser" of the right fabric, and often picks something that you would not expect, but turns out to be "so right".

The finished quilt, all quilted, and with binding. Thankyou to my fairies.

Another job that was waiting were these 2 grow panels, that I had purchases "recently" for Miss Billie and Miss Bridie. There parents will have to convert metric back to inches, as they are marked in inches.

I added a plain fabric to one side of each, so that they can mark the children's height measurements to this side. Then they were loaded onto Max to be custom quilted, and the binding finished by my fairies. 

Again, Val picked out the binding, and it was so right for this quilt. The spots on the fabric look almost like the spots on the giraffe, don't you think?

In that time, Max has also been busy quilting another 2 quilts, (of mine), that I will post about another day. (My quilter must have heard me complaining about her in the last post!!)

New Year's Eve and a Birthday

As the weather on New years Eve was not planned to be in the 40's, I decided to have a few friends over for the evening. We had an enjoyable evening, commencing with cheese platters prior to meats and salads, and dessert. Since then we have been eating leftovers, (which has made more time for sewing!) We even used paper plates, and disposable cutlery!! It's all about making life easier, and making more time for people, and sewing!!!

Here is my 90 year old (almost) neighbour who played his guitar and sang to us. Nic has an interesting life story, having come to Australia from the Ukraine when he was a teenager.

December 31st is also the birthday of this lady, so we had a cake, and sang to her.

Mostly we are not into really late nights, and expected to be asleep when the year turned over, but as it turned out we were still watching the clock when 2019 arrived. It was a special evening with good friends and lots of laughter. I do know there have been a few nanna naps in the last couple of days though, to catch up.

All in all it has been a very productive few days, and it feels great to get these jobs done. Val has also been sewing some of her own projects, and will depart tomorrow. My other fairy will leave on Friday. She is an amazing organiser, and "sorterouter", and put some organisation into some of my chaos!! Thankyou to Val and to Raylene.

The water is turned on outside tonight, as we are expecting 40deg tomorrow, so I shall be staying indoors with the air con going. I am debating whether I might take another couple of days to work on some of my own projects, or get back to customer quilts, and that queue of custom quilts. ???? What do you think? Bearing in mind the fact that I shall be up the highway soon when that baby makes an appearance!

Time to shift the water, will be back soon with another post of quilt photos.

Blessings, From Jude