I showed you this last year — my very first quilt, which has been languishing in a closet forever. Obviously, I didn’t know how much I had to learn! There are some pretty obvious holes in the centres of those stars. I still love the colours I used in it though, and don’t want to just throw it out.


Rose Marie over at Applique ‘n Patch Quilting suggested I do a small star to applique on top of those centres. Brilliant! So we went on a hunt for the perfect yellow for the little stars. Found it. Printed a whole bunch of .75″ diamonds using Inklingo Collection 3 and started making the little 6-point stars. I think this is going to look fabulous when it’s done! It will be quite bright, which was the plan in the first place, and these little stars will cover the holes perfectly. Thanks, Rose Marie. Now to just finish making enough of them and applique them on — and then this will be ready to baste and quilt. 🙂

And, to finish off the week, yet another Smudge lounging pose. They are endless!

I just love stitching 9 and 4-patch blocks sometimes. They are always so satisfying to finish and go together so quickly. We had a swap of 1″ squares on the Inklingo list last year and I got rather carried away with printing the little squares. Now I have all sorts of them that I am slowly putting together into 4 or 9-patch blocks here and there. Not sure if I’m heading towards a doll’s quilt with these or will just keep going till I have enough pieced to make a lap-sized quilt but, in the meantime, I’m having so much fun stitching them! There are evenings when I want to stitch, but want something mindless and that’s when these come out.

Hand stitching means I can fan the intersections, like this, and have no bulk. When pressed, the blocks lie wonderfully flat and look super.

Smudge, in yet another of his numerous poses. The pictures of him are endless! He loves having his picture taken — the minute he hears that little click when we turn the camera on, he poses. Thank goodness for digital cameras. We could never have taken as many pictures of these two and developed them all with a regular camera!

I thought (wishful thinking?) that winter was over. Wrong! Yesterday afternoon, just in time for rush hour, the wind picked up, snow and rain started and it was absolutely miserable. At least today we’ve got sun, although I think there’s another storm coming tomorrow. Beginning to think this will be one of the years we go from having heat on to having the air conditioning on and no moderate weather in between.

The box containing all the bits is turning into these and there are more colours yet to come — ones I haven’t stitched yet. Having all the setting pieces prepared using Inklingo makes for very fast stitching. We watched a movie last night and I had 4 star rectangles finished by the time it was over.

And they are turning into 9-patch blocks:

I’m not sure whether every 9-patch block will be composed of stars in one colour or not yet — I may just mix them up as it is, as per my usual, going to be a pretty scrappy quilt. :-))

The 9-patch blocks are huge to me! The unfinished measurement is 15 3/8″ by 13.5″. Those are, other than applique, the largest blocks I’ve dealt with! Guess this top will go together quickly.

And just because he’s so cute and we can’t resist taking photos of him when he sleeps like this, a picture of Smudge:

These fabrics have been in my stash for a while and I’ve been itching to make something with them.

In my seemingly endless fascination with stars of any size, I decided to make these:

Each star rectangle measures about 4 3/8 by 5 inches. I’m thinking I’ll set the star rectangles into 9-patch units with a large blank rectangle in between. That, of course, is totally subject to change when I get all the stars made. 🙂 They’re all printed now with the 1.5″ diamonds and related setting pieces from Inklingo collection 3 so it’s just a matter of stitching them.

The draw for the little Inklingo stitching kits giveaway is delayed for a few hours as my helpers (the ones I hoped would draw the winners’ names) are both sound asleep and I will have to wait for DH to get home to draw the names. 🙂 As soon as that is done, there will be another post!