Tag Archives: quilts

Christmas Star — part 2 of adventure

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The block was together in next to no time. The flying geese, HST and QST units were incredibly easy and fast to do with Inklingo and I had absolutely no precision rotary cutting to do, no curious math to cope with, no stretchy bias edges to deal with and no bits of paper to pick off. For a novice at machine piecing, I’m pretty pleased with how the block turned out.

I have been using Inklingo for about a year and a half now and have made countless hand-pieced items, including the shabby chic king-sized quilt, but decided to find out what machine piecers love about Collection 2 — and I’m sold! This may actually encourage me to become a machine piecer for some blocks.

The only real problem I had was with the bulky seam intersections when sewing the rows together to complete the block. My machine seemed to really labour at the intersections and then the seams tended to get a bit crooked. I’m sure this is me not having experience using the sewing machine for piecing and I intend to try another block of the Christmas Star on the weekend when I have more time and see if I can put together a perfect one.

All in all, although this block will go into the orphan block box, I’m very pleased with how it turned out. I’m enough of a perfectionist that I want to do better. One thing’s for sure — I will be able to make this quilt top really fast! I had the pieces printed and was at the sewing machine within minutes.

An Almost Finish

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This has now been quilted. The long-arm quilter did the most beautiful work on it. Unfortunately, we can’t get a good overall shot because of the size of it — it’s 122 by 86 inches. As soon as I get the binding on, we’re taking it to a friend who has a professional photography set-up and getting some good photos.

However, here are a couple of pictures of it — the front and back. The back really shows the quilting design well.


On the Christmas present front, things are progressing. The Wedgwood blue and white table runner is really coming along nicely as is the Seven Sisters variation one.

Lester, our wonderful big Maine Coon kitty, seems to be holding his own but has to have an echo-cardiogram done in December so they can see if his heart function has gotten worse.

Progress Report

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I am making slow progress on this table runner, but the first of the five blocks is complete and all the pieces for the remaining four blocks are printed and cut out, ready to stitch.

The one diamond that is sticking out is going to be the connector to the next block of this runner. I think it will be quite striking, as the coloured fabrics I’m using are all from the same line. I hope it turns out as nicely as I’m hoping.

I am making much better progress on the other table runner I’m working on for Christmas. It is really turning out quite nicely. It’s in a Wedgwood blue and white and will be, I think, finished within the next 10 days to 2 weeks.

In the meantime, we have had a real scare over the past 3 or 4 days. Our eldest kitty, Lester, who will be 9 in December and who has heart disease, threw a clot on the weekend as a result of which his tail was just dragging on the floor. Until today, that is. Today he started to lift it up again and I think the clot must be dissolving. Our vet is researching what meds to put him on next. The thing that I find frightening is that even while on Plavix he threw a clot like this! However, I’m very grateful that he seems to be fine other than the tail issue. Things could have been a whole lot worse.

Finished Project!

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Finally, I finished the ’30s table runner. Every piece in it is an Inklingo shape which made it so easy to do. Actually, I finished it a few weeks ago but didn’t get pictures till last week. I’m quite pleased with it, even with my machine quilting on it which is quite something for me — I am not thrilled with my ability to machine quilt at all, so feeling good about this was great!

We have been enjoying the late summer days lately — love the heat and those wonderful blue skies, but am really shocked at the number of leaves changing colour already. Makes me wonder if we’re in for an early winter.

The kitties have been very busy lately playing with their caterpillar toy. We get such a huge kick out of their antics with this toy that I sometimes wonder who has more fun, them or us!

Wednesday Woes

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Work is most definitely getting in the way of quilting! I’ll be lucky to do much of anything for about two weeks as we have hit the “It’s almost summer. Got to get this done before holidays start!” hysteria that seems to happen every year. Am a bit surprised this didn’t occur earlier this year, given how incredibly warm it has been here all month. However, it will be two weeks of insanity followed by about two months of very little.

I’ve been playing with another design using the Inklingo 1 and 2-inch hexagons and the star point on Collection 1. Think this one will be a large lap quilt. It goes together incredibly quickly and is a lot of fun.



This is about to get basted and go in the hoop. It’s one of the Pacific Rim 2-fabric appliques and was great fun to work on. The 2-fabric applique patterns all seem so enticing.

This is Smudge, Lester’s half-brother. He is an imp. One of his favourite tricks is to bat at the thread as I’m trying to get it in the needle. Sometimes it’s very frustrating. He has some very odd habits such as meowing incredibly loudly in the middle of the night as he sits on the bedroom windowsill looking out on the roof garden. He’s a definite lap kitty and would, if we would sit still that long, stay on a lap for 2 or 3 hours at a time.