It's been a busy week, and there hasn't been a lot of time in the sewing room.  In fact, nearly everything was accomplished in the hour before I go to work, between 6 and 7am.  I usually hate working in such short timespans, but just lately I'm grateful for any amount of sewing time.

I have three UFOs on the go, and there has been a little progress on each.  I have the Vintage Rosettes in three pieces, and they were all ironed ready to be joined together.

 Normally hexagons go together beautifully, all the seams fanning perfectly; even the little diamonds aren't a problem.  It's that pesky triangle that is the problem, there's no way to make those seam allowances fan nicely, so they had to be mashed flat.  Oh well, there are two more seams to sew with them, two more seams to iron, and then it will just be a case of adding a border to make the edges straight.  The end is in sight at last.

The baskets are just not enthralling me at the moment, so there's not much to show; I've added the spacer borders, so that the triangle border is easy to attach, but I'm just not very enthusiastic about finishing it.  Maybe this weekend will see me buckle down and get it done.  I have loads of computer work to finalise, maybe I can use the sewing as a bribe when I need a break.

The other UFO is an ugly one; I made a whole heap of Broken Dishes and Pinwheel blocks years ago, out of the triangles cut from binding strips. 

We have done heaps of bindings on customer quilts, it's just mind-boggling to think how many we've done over the years.  There are 36 blocks, each containing the triangles from 2 quilts, so that's 72 bindings represented in these blocks.  More actually, as sometimes there weren't enough triangles in one fabric, and I added bits from other quilts.  I got sick of making the blocks years ago, so Mereth now takes the triangles and they go into her scrap drawers.  There are two checkerboards made from backing scraps in the top row, but then I found  more blocks and didn't need them.  They'll go on the back with everything else that's left over.

I was so tempted to bin these blocks, pretty ugly colours, and definitely not my fabric choices; but they represent years of work and so many memories, and remind me of the customers and their quilts.  I decided that a quilt made of significant blocks was better than a pretty quilt, and now I'm really enjoying putting them together.  I'm using scraps of backing fabrics to sash and border them, and it's looking far better than it should.  This one is making me happy as I work on it.

It's been christened the Workaday Quilt, because all the pieces represent our working days, quilting, binding and sewing. 

And when it comes time to bind this quilt I've got that covered too.