a lovely weekend.....

A lovely weekend was had here with good friends and some sewing just for fun.

On Saturday, Patch and Quilt here in Gisborne held a book launch for Irene Blanck and her new book 'Focus on Applique', published by Quiltmania.

Last year Irene had an exhibition of her quilts here at Mary's shop, and they are truly exquisite.  You can see some photos here.

Irene's new book is beautiful, with many gorgeous projects within its pages.

Tracee, Marg and I meet up with some of our 'City Girl' friends, Elyte, Marina and Anne, and as always, it was a fun day filled with much laughter.

Elyte, Marg, Irene and Tracee

Tracee, Anne and Marg in deep quilty discussion.....

Hmmmm, is this fabric going to work.....

Three lovely ladies... Elyte, Marina and Irene

Irene ready to sign her books, with Mary and Ashleigh working hard behind.....

We ended up making a day of it, meeting at 10.30 for coffee, then

off to the book signing, then out for lunch.  I really had the most enjoyable and fun day, it was wonderful.

Elyte, Anne, Marina and myself have signed up for a 'Clamshells' class in August with Irene, and I am really looking forward to it.

Some sewing just for fun was also done.  I have been wanting to make some small fabric baskets for awhile now to hold the million and one scraps accumulating around the house, with each basket colour matching the scraps it will hold.  During the week I searched out some patterns, and decided to give this one a go, by Rachel Griffiths of PS I Quilt.  This was obviously quite a small basket, but I made it in its original size to practice the construction, and then played with the size to make a bigger basket. 

Two baskets later.....

I was really happy with these, and they are really quick and easy to make - the qulting of the fabric takes the most time.  You can see that the first one is quite small compared with my rotary cutter. I was really happy with the second one, but I think some more pattern tweaking is in order, to end up with a size about half way between the two.

I really enjoyed making these, and the pattern also has an option for handles, so they also make a cute little gift bag.  More of these little baskets are now definitely on the to do list.

Hope your weekend was as much fun as mine! xx

fnsi & another lovely weekend.....

It's been another lovely weekend here, starting with FNSI, and continuing through until tonight.

There has been lots of sewing - FNSI saw me making my 'homework' block for the underground railroad quilt project, a log cabin block - actually it's been a weekend for 'building' log cabins(!) as I worked on some of my small log cabin blocks too.

homework block

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am taking part in the Huckleberry Stitches 'Kathleen Tracy/Prairie Children and Their Quilts' quilt along, and I have now finished the 12 blocks needed for this quilt.  This mini quilt has a total of 156 pieces, so there has been lots of cutting and sewing.  My blocks are now ready to put together.

I did struggle with putting these together.  By the time I started the second 'round', they started to get very wonky, so I actually drew up the log cabins as a foundation piecing pattern and made them that way, and am much happier with them.  I also tried to make them pretty scrappy, so I will see if that worked when I put them all together!

I also made a bag..... I have a bit of a love of foxes, both real and the crafty kind (show me a really cute fox softie and I nearly swoon lol!), so when I found this fabric last week at Lincraft, I could straight away imagine it in a bag -

During the week I looked for a bag pattern I liked and came across the '32 Minute Messenger Bag', a free pattern and tutorial on Amy Smart's 'Diary of a Quilter' blog.    Having not really made a bag before, I decided to make a practice version, before I cut up my cute foxy fabric and quite possibly ended up wrecking it.

Here is the result;  I used these fabrics from my stash

and ended up with this bag.....

I have to say, not being very experienced at bag making, it did take me quite a lot longer than 32 minutes, but I mucked around with the strap a bit.  I'm sure it will take me a lot less time next time..... but I am happy with how it turned out for my first attempt!

There was also my usual Saturday activity, watching my nephew play basketball, they had a good win yesterday which was great, and then this morning I took my nephew out for breakfast to our favourite cafe, 3 Little Pigs.  We had a fantastic time, my nephew is such great company and very funny.

So another lovely weekend has flown by; I hope your FNSI and weekend plans were fantastic too!

xx