One day project

Not quite all in a day - there was a bit of preparation first - but almost! My French stitchery group had a one-day workshop at which we each made a large tote bag. Five of us took part, plus our tutor for the day, and we had all chosen completely different fabric combinations, so that our bags - all made from the same pattern - are very distinctive. I brought my bag home with the side seams, lining and top binding still to be done, but couldn't bear the thought of this becoming another UFO, so stayed up late until it was finished. I love it!

Final cushion finished

I finally got round to finishing the "Trip Around the World" patchwork cushion which has been waiting since January ... this is the seventh - and last, as I don't have more of these fabrics left. It's also slightly bigger than the first ones - but the fabrics all match.

I've also made another block for my sampler quilt - I now have five done. This was the "Maple Leaf" pattern - hand pieced then machine quilted.

Two complete

Two items finished off this week - one is a lap blanket (which will eventually be a SIBOL gift) - made with the yarn left over from the jacket I finished recently. On the photo it looks like there's a dirty mark on it - a strange trick of the light! The centre is a square from a pattern found on Ravelry (Sweet and Fair Afghan Square), then I just kept adding rounds of (UK) trebles until the yarn ran out! Fortunately this made it about the right size for a lap blanket.

The other piece is the baby blanket which I was making as a practice piece using different stitches of Tunisian crochet. The last time I mentioned it on here was because I couldn't find it! This was because I was looking in London and had actually left it at my French house. As with the lap blanket, I was using up leftover yarn and again ended up with a practical sized blanket when the yarn ran out! A border of white yarn made a neat job of the edges.

I bought a couple of children's playmats - the foam jigsaw ones - to use for blocking the pieces.

My French stitchery group has a one-day workshop next week - we'll each be making a quilted tote bag - so I've started work on that - quilting a couple of pieces ahead of the day. I went shopping with one of the other group members to buy fabric for her bag - and ended up adding three pieces to my stash too.

My sampler quilt progressed to the stage where I now have four blocks complete - but I need at least twelve even to make a quilt for one of the bunk beds - so that won't be done in a hurry. I'm trying to do a bit of work each day on the hand quilting of the group quilt too - and still have a cushion to finish - patchwork done in January, backing added and cushion pad bought a bit later - now needs zip and piping to complete.

One down!

Completely the wrong season for it ... but I have managed to finish the chunky jacket I started in April. However, there's quite a bit of yarn left over...

I'd found this really nice yarn in a discount store and wanted to make something with it. It wasn’t until I started knitting it up that I realised the colour blend wasn’t random - so the result was a striped piece; unfortunately this meant I then had to work it so that the stripes matched up on the seams - which meant lots of cutting and loads of yarn ends to darn in. It was also complicated by the fact that some of the balls of yarn were wound with the colours in the opposite direction to others, so these had to be re-wound by hand so that the colour sequence came out right. I later looked at others’ work on this pattern and saw that some had knitted in one piece so no side seams - would have saved me time but made the stripes quite narrow.