A flurry of finishes (and starts) from Frigid Frankston - aka Covid Craft Collection

Greetings this weekend from a frosty, frigid Frankston.

In the height of stage 4 lockdown, it is the perfect weather to hunker down and get well involved in the craft room.  This is why I chuckled at a group of pictures of lockdown Barbies – gardening, cooking, home-schooling etc..   and had to admit that I’m THIS Barbie!

Now onto Show and Tell.

I finished the simple and sweet Jardin Privé ‘Spirale’ and as I had been staring at it in my hoop, knew I had to finish it in the round.   This is the result and I’m really pleased with this little mat.  I revisited making proper bias binding for this, not just cutting 2 ½ inch strips for quilts.  I always like to try different techniques with each project.

My lovely high-low office desk has now been installed in my sewing nook and to celebrate (and try it out) decided last Saturday that I HAD to make something. 

I dived into my pile of 2 ½” squares and made a simple disappearing 9patch mini quilt, using up scraps for borders and binding.  A simple cross hatch quilting to finish it off and it was finished in one day  This will end up in the gift box for a random somebody this year.

On Sunday, I decided I needed another little fabric box to store my quilt clips –

so much nicer on my desk than a plastic bag.  I might make another for the quilting safety pins, but for the time being, they can live in their plastic bag – if I change it now, I’ll never find them!

Next on the project list was my SAL for this year, stitching the August section on both the lilac and blue fabric.  Now somewhere along the piece, I mis-counted the fabric on the blue fabric and the whole chart will not fit.  So I’ve made an adjustment and will stitch that in.  The lilac will continue as per the original chart. 

I’ll add these to the SAL page during the week, as those on my facebook group stitching along have now got the whole chart.

And onto the NEXT Project  …..   yes shutdown means a lot of production.

I saw the tutorial for this onJordan Fabrics last year and loved it – so bought the pattern and this has been sitting for nearly a year on the back burner.  Night Flight by Basic Grey.  I have so much Halloween fabric (or so I thought) that  this would be a simple project.   Well, it turns out I have not as much as I thought, and as I’m on a personal challenge to use up my stash and not buy more fabric (as if!) – decided to use some of my batiks to fill out the colour range – particularly the green. 

  I spent an afternoon reading the pattern and creating a small spreadsheet of colours/size cuts/distribution and determined that while the pattern is written to make 320 HST in 2 at a time method – I don’t really like this method and worked out that I would cut my fabric in order to use the 4 at a time method and spend the time to press and trim each one.    So yesterday, I spent 5-6 hours cutting all the fabric, using my lovely new hi-low desk set at (hopefully) the right height.    Today, after writing this to you, my fabric friends will be spent making the 320 HST required for this project.    I tend to leave my patchwork for weekends and stitch on weeknights, so there is no rush to finish all this in a weekend.

I leave you now to continue on my stitchy weekend.  Come back again to see the progress.