Thursday, July 16, 2026

Slow Progress and I Quilted This!

Hi and welcome 😊 The last week has been busy so there's not much progress on my projects. We're expecting slightly cooler weather that I hope to enjoy.

Summer Hexie Sew Along

I finally decided on the fabric for my hexie wreath and made four hexie flowers to see how they look. Week one of the sew along is to make two groups of three flowers, while week two is making one group of four flowers (which I guess I made) and then one double flower.

Four hexie flowers

At the back of the photo below you can see the four main fabric that I'll be using for the wreath. Most of the scraps in front will be used for the centre of the hexie flowers, or possibly the middle ring of the double hexie flowers. This should give me enough fabric to experiment with.

Fabric pull for the hexies

The sew along suggests using 1" hexies but since my Scrappy Hexie Blanket is made with ¾" hexies, I've decided to use these for the sew along. This way if I make flowers that don't really go with the rest, I can just add them to the blanket.

with Mad About Patchwork

FMQ More Rooves

I finished FMQ the rooves of the evening houses and started on the first of the regular houses. A few people commented on how well I had FMQ the roof last week. The stars must have been aligned or it was beginner's luck because the other houses haven't been as good 😕It's all good because eventually I'll be washing the quilt and it'll all look great!

You can see in the next two photos that the top row of the shingles stick out a bit - that's because they bunched up a bit. That's why I'm hoping that washing the quilt will help.

FMA clamshells for a shingles look

Quilting the roof with slightly larger clamshells

On the other hand, I learned from my experience and stitched the horizontal lines in before FMQ the clamshells. It really helped.

FMQ the roof clamshells after quilting horizontal lines to follow

Blue Jays Appliqué

I went shopping with my DIL for some fun fabric for her Blue Jays appliqué. I'll be washing the fabric and making it this weekend. Here's the mock up and the new fabric.

Blue Jays mock up

New fun fabric

What I learned

Choosing fabric for the hexie wreath was difficult because I had 4 fabrics that are from the same line but also have the same values. In my scrap box, I found enough coordinating fabric that are darker or just different.
I'm not sure how they will work together but worse case scenario they'll be integrated into the scrappy blanket 😁
As I mentioned earlier the two evening houses on which I FMQ the rooves ended up with some bunching in the top clamshell row. I solved that the next time by stitching horizontal lines before stitching the clamshells.
Once the quilt is washed, I don't think that the bunching will show much.
I didn't get much FMQ done this week so I'll have to push myself to keep going. I find that the heat and humidity just zap the energy out of me, even if I don't go outside.
My son and DIL are going to a Blue Jays game in Toronto around the 25th, so I hope to have the t-shirt done in time. That would be cool.

I Quilted This!

Welcome to the I Quilted This! linking party that celebrates quilting on a domestic machine or custom quilting on a long-arm. Feel free to link up and share any recent project, even if you're not quilting it!

Here are the posts that included FMQ, ruler work and walking foot quilting last week. Thanks for linking up 😊 and consider grabbing the button.

Kat from Scrapbox Quilts quilted a lovely baby quilt using a petal template. It looks wonderful! It'll be donated to The Hope Centre.

Kat quilted this donated baby quilt top

Kat used a template to quilt these flower petals on the baby quilt

Gail of Quilting Gail posted about the prompt "binding beauty". You can read her post about the various types of binding she uses. Here's one of her quilts with a flange binding.

Gail's quilt with a flange binding

It's now your turn 😍

Thursday, July 09, 2026

This and that and I Quilted This!

Allô and welcome 😊 Thanks for dropping by. My studio is much cooler than outside lately, so I'm spending more time here until things change! On the weekend though, I enjoyed some quality time outside with Poppy. She made sure that the yard was free of visitors (I stopped feeding the birds before she came so it was quiet). It was a lovely cool weekend so I played with hexies.

Lots of Hexies

Although the Summer Hexies Sew-Along started this week, I'm still struggling with choosing fabric. It's so much easier when it's pure scrappiness but I'd like to make something different. So instead of starting the new project, I attached more hexie flowers to my already existing Scrappy Hexie Blanket. It's slowly getting bigger, one flower at a time.

Scrappy Hexie Blanket slowly getting larger

Blue Jays Appliqué

My DIL requested a Blue Jays appliqué to attach on a t-shirt. I made a mock-up. Now what I've figured out how to put it together, I'll be using some cutter fabrics of her choice to make it.

Fist attempt - the mock-up which is only fused

I learned a few things so it was worth making this mock-up. I'm hoping to have the fabric in the next week to make the real thing!

FMQ Another House

This is the party house of the quilt. It's decorated with music and dancing so I tried to show that in the quilting. The house is quilted with squiggly lines to add movement. I also researched FMQ rooves and decided on the tile look which is essentially clamshells. On this house the clamshells are small but I'll be trying slightly larger clamshells for the next house

The eighth house is quilted 😃

Squiggly lines to go with the dancing

FMQ clamshells for the roof

What I learned

It was fun playing with hexies again. I've figured out that when I'm restless, I want to baste the individual hexies. Then, when I'm calmer, I enjoy sewing them together. This weekend it was about sewing them together.
I don't see the end of the Scrappy Hexies Blanket in sight so I'm just trying to add to it and keep it as straight as possible. Eventually I hope to add a hexie border to make it straighter 😊
I traced the Blue Jays pattern and then transferred it onto freezer paper. I learned that with my eyesight being what it is, I need to use small sharp scissors to stay on the line. I don't notice when I'm cutting, but I seem to be consistently cutting about an ⅛" to the right of the line.
I ended up transferring the design to Steam-a-Seam, so I won't need to use freezer paper. The less steps the better.
I really enjoyed FMQ the party house. I even surprised myself by doing a good job on the tile roof. It's quite small but when you get into the flow, it goes so well. I'm looking forward to doing the other rooves and varying the size of the clamshells to see how that goes.

Poppy, guarding the yard

I Quilted This!

Welcome to the I Quilted This! linking party that celebrates quilting on a domestic machine or custom quilting on a long-arm. Feel free to link up and share any recent project, even if you're not quilting it!

Here are the posts that included FMQ, ruler work and walking foot quilting last week. Thanks for linking up 😊 and consider grabbing the button.

Diann @ Little Penguin Quilts kept playing with her scraps and made this cute table topper. It's perfect for her chest displaying seasonal quilts. Check out her post to see the lovely backing she used!

Diann's cute scrappy table topper

Diann's table topper on her decorated chest

Terry of On Going Projects made the loveliest wall hanging to celebrate a book that she read with her book club. This is a two part post. The first one was about the construction of the piece and this one is all about the quilting. You'll want to read both posts!

Terry's finished Read wall hanging

Check out the FMQ details of Terry's wall hanging

Gail of Quilting Gail is participating in a Lazy Summer Quilt Camp photo challenge. The prompt for day 3 was texture. Here is a lovely mini art quilt that Gail made based on an Island Batik challenge using “Pompeii Red.” To learn more about the Lazy Summer Quilt Camp photo challenge, read Gail's post. It also has a link to her original post.

Gail's very textured art quilt, “Mt. Vesuvius Eruption.”

It's now your turn 😍

Thursday, July 02, 2026

Converting House Blocks to Quilt-As-You-Go and I Quilted This!

Hello and welcome 😎 With the hot and muggy summer here, I'm mostly estivating, except when it's cool enough to have my first coffee outside. I'd rather spend some quality time in my studio than wilt in the garden. I can take the heat, sort of, if it's not too muggy out so we'll see where I end up spending my summer!

Quilt-As-You-Go (QAYG) House Blocks

I was planning on doing this after I finish FMQ my Rainbow Neighbourhood quilt but I just couldn't help it. For my Quilter's Cove QAL, I bought a few brown fabrics for the window sills and really wanted to see what it would look like in an Attic Window setting. Here they all are.

Six houses now as attic window blocks

Attic Window

If you're not familiar with the attic window block, here's what's happening. To create the attic window, I have added the inside of what looks like a window sill to the house block. That's the dark vertical brown, and then the light brown strip at the bottom. Doesn't that look like you're looking at the house through a window? The light pink/gray fabric on the side and on top are the sashing that separate the windows and add contrast.

Attic Window added to the orange house block

Because of my total lack of planning, you can see that the window ledge is cutting up the roof of the orange house. I measured all of my blocks and decided that they would each be 9" x 10½". That means that the orange, pastel and pink blocks were trimmed while I had to add an extra strip to the red, blue and green blocks. Here's what I did.

For the red house I needed to add ¾" to the width of the block. I wanted to keep it simple so I found hand-dyed scraps for the sky and the lawn. Not perfect but really good enough once the attic window and sashing are added.

Adding fabric to the side of the block

Trimming the extra fabric on the block

Here is the finished block.

The added strip doesn't show much on the red house block

Here's what my first house, the blue one, looked like when I originally made it. It was the smallest block of the batch.

My original blue house was much smaller

Here's what it looks like after adding a couple of inches to the width as well as embellishment.

Updated blue house as an attic window block

For the green Danish houses, I needed to add ¾" to the width of the block. Here's what it originally looked like.

The green block was not quite wide enough

If you look carefully, you can see that the dark brown vertical sill is just a tad wider than the sill.

Adding a ½" of dark brown to the green houses block

Quilt-As-You-Go

Now that the houses are in attic window blocks, the next part will be to quilt-as-you-go. It's exactly what it's called. I'll be adding batting and a backing to each attic window block and will quilt them separately. It's easier to quilt a smaller block than it is a full quilt. Once it's FMQ, you stitch the fronts together and then the backs. Probably not quite as simple as it sounds but it's not too difficult. Hopefully I will have considered everything while I converted the blocks to attic windows. I'll deal with it once all of the blocks have been quilted. That's a problem for future me 😁

What I learned

When I decided to put the houses in attic window blocks, I did a lot of research on how there were done. Finding free patterns on the internet helped a lot.
Getting all of the blocks to be the same size was a challenge but I love that kind of problem solving! 😊
I have no idea why I assumed that the window sills needed to be brown (when I looked at the window sills in our house, they're all white!) Anyway it worked out well.
I'm really happy that I found the pink/gray fabric for the sashing in my stash. I think it's perfect. Since I now have lots of brown fabric, I might use one of these for the backing. I need to choose before I start the QAYG.
I'll share the QAYG when I start it, probably in August since I now have to get back to my Rainbow Neighbourhood quilt.
I like the way the additions to the two blocks, the red and the blue houses, came out. Adding extra fun elements to the blue house made it easier to hide the addition!

I Quilted This!

Here are the posts that included FMQ, ruler work and walking foot quilting last week. Thanks for linking up 😊 and consider grabbing the button.

Gwyned Trefethen is eagerly anticipating the return of her Bernina but meanwhile she made a wholecloth sampler of FMQ designs.

FMQ sampler by Gwyned

The writer of Based On A True Story blog finished her Carousel Quilt which she had first posted about in 2017! The quilt is really stunning although the border didn't cooperate. She finished it and it looks great - without the border!

BTW, I haven't been able to leave a comment on your blog, so thanks for linking up!

A lovely Carousel Quilt finish

Melva finished a lovely ABC quilt. It looks wonderful, even if it wasn't in the colour way she was hoping for. Sometimes you have to go with the scraps you have!