Row by row quilt - Row 7

Although all 9 rows is finished and the quilting 2/3's of the way done, I have not posted pictures of row 7 yet. 

I struggled with the 2 rouche blocks that forms part of this row and in the end opted for two 9 patch blocks as time was running out and I just could not get the technique quite right.  So, this is the only deviation I made to the quilt.

I stitched the 4 sewing machine blocks in the 2 colour ways shown below:

The design is from Smartneedle.  It is actually part of a beautiful Sewing Pouch and you can find the design here.

and the 9 patch blocks looks like this.

Now I just need to finish the quilting, border and binding in time for our meeting coming Saturday 5 November...

Row by row Quilt - Row 1

I finally managed to complete all the blocks and rows required for this quilt and started quilting it today.  With only one week left to finish the quilting, I really have my work cut out for me.  As Murphy stated, the work expands to fill the time available and I am really testing that saying. 

I was really apprehensive doing the Texas star version that represents our Guild's logo as the blocks is really small to incorporate all the little pieces.  The first one I did earlier this year, ended up in the trash as I just could not get all the points to match up.  At that stage I thought it best to do another block or just omit this row, but as it is our Guild's logo, it didn't really made sense.  So, whilst stitching all the other rows, this stayed in my mind and I finally came up with a solution by buying tracing paper which weighs only 50 grams to the 80 grams of normal paper to use for the paper piecing method. 

I started with this row of which I stitched 12 as well as another 12 without the squares on the edges.

 The centre pieces looked like this:

and this is how the completed blocks looks like after assembling the 48 different pieces



which I made in the two colour ways.  By pressing some of the seams open as well, it really helped with the bulky seams.  I also kept the paper pieces at the back until the row of 6 blocks was completely finished.  It did took 2.5 hours to unpick all the paper pieces, but they did what they were suppose to do - lining up all the corners.

Spit cloths

Whilst trying to finish the Row-by-Row quilt in time for the last quarterly meeting of the Oranje quilters guild, I took a night off to embroider a few spit cloths for a dear quilting friend of mine who had a baby shower yesterday.

Magda made this beautiful quilt for the baby on request of the grandmother.



I then used some of the leftover fabric to applique elephants on 3 of the spit cloths

and clouds on the fourth one.

The pink elephant is from Hatched in Africa's  Cuddlesome Critters 1 set and the purple one from their Cuddlesome Zoo Animals series.  The green one can be found on the Adorable applique website.