About 10 years ago I made some scrap stars on a blue background, and they have sat in the UFO pile ever since.

 I was experimenting with ways to foundation piece Le Moyne stars, and I liked the results but wasn't really taken with the method.

 I made 9 and called it quits, and pieced a huge pile of scraps into the sashes and border.

I tried numerous times to give them a fancy pieced border, and nothing looked good.

 So I just slapped a triple border on it and called it done.

This is the exact opposite of the immense amount of care I took with the borders on the grey quilt, but that doesn't bother me.  It's not as if I didn't try to do something more elaborate, but I just couldn't come up with anything that struck me as Right.  So now this is a little wallhanging or lap size quilt, and I'm happy to cross another one off the list.  I'm down to 19 UFOs now, and I can't wait to get another one out of the box and start working on it.  I have a busy Easter break planned, lots of traveling and visitors, so nothing will happen for a while.  When I do get some time I'll be sewing with a passion.

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 On Friday Mereth and I went down to Adelaide for my DD's baby shower; Shonny has only 6 weeks to go, and we're all getting pretty excited at the thought of another baby girl in the family.  We took the dogs with us, as we weren't sure how long we'd be away; they are old hands at traveling, so it was an easy trip with them.

For dinner on Friday night they had bowls full of roast beef; until recently Shonny was working at a restaurant and they threw out so much meat from the carvery each night.  She started bringing some home and freezing it for our puppies, so they have a lovely treat when they come to stay.

Check out Dolly's fancy dinner plate;

Harrods of London!  Our friends brought it back from England as a Thank-you gift for babysitting the farm and Tawny. I laughed and laughed when I unwrapped it, what a brilliant souvenir.  They wanted to bring one back for Pippi too, but they didn't have room, so Pips has to share.  Dolly is such a fusspot about her food, this just reaffirms her conviction that she's Royalty.

We came home late last night, and I was too tired to do anything except sleep; however this morning I tackled the last borders on the grey quilt.  I made no attempt to make the borders the right length, I just sewed together enough triangles so that I had four strips a bit longer than each side. I lined the start and end up with the border, and pinned the triangles to the border until I could see how much excess there was.  Then I just took tiny extra seams between the triangles until the triangles matched the border.

I only needed to take a tiny seam, just a few threads away from the existing seam.

That took one eighth of an inch off each time, so I only had to adjust between 4 and 6 seams each side.  It was a lot easier than getting out the tape measure and the calculator.

Once all the borders were attached I ran a line of stitching around the edge to hold all those seams in place, and it was Finished!  I'm so relieved.  I thought I was going to be sewing on this forever.  I don't quite know what to do with myself now; the design wall is empty and nothing is clamouring for attention; I will have to consult the UFO list and choose something else.  I have a sneaking suspicion that my Dear Jane will be next in line for borders....

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Today I've been shuttling back and forth between bookwork and the sewing machine, swapping from one to another every time I got sick of what I was doing.  Early in the day the sewing was a welcome break from the tax matters, but as the day wore on I was relieved to stop working on those troublesome borders and go back to the paperwork.  My Wordy, Lordy Me, this quilt has been a lot of trouble and bother and it's still giving me fits.

The end is in sight though. I have the final triangle border to attach, and then it is DONE!  I love how it's turning out, but I've put so much effort into it. I know I have to keep on until it's finished, but there has been no time for anything else.

If I'd known how much work was in those little squares on point the whole lot might have gone back into the cupboard for another three years! And I had to change the border fabric too, that beautiful French General print was just a tad too light so this murky blue-grey was substituted.

I have the majority of the last border pieced together, I just need a few more triangles and then I can attach them around the outside.  I don't expect it to be easy, because very little about this quilt has been easy, but it's just something I need to stick at until it's all done.

I have an appointment with this pile of triangles, tearing off the paper and pressing them; if I get that done tonight I"ll be happy, so I'm off to watch NCIS with a cup of coffee and the waste paper bin.  Tomorrow I'll be all set to tackle that last border.

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It's a long weekend here in South Australia, and it's lovely to sit here and plan what I"m going to get done in the next three days.  It's tempting to put really big jobs on the TO-Do list, but then the whole weekend is hi-jacked by them, so I'm going to try and be a little more realistic. 
For the last few weeks, Mereth and I have been giving each other a little challenge as we leave work on Friday.  We each pick one thing that we will have done before we come back to work on Monday, and it's been fun to try and knock those goals over.  Last weekend I wanted to choose the borders for the grey quilt, and I achieved that.  This weekend I would like to have all the piecing finished, and some of them attached.

I've been working on several computer things during the week, and in the scraps of spare time I cut and sewed the units for the two pieced borders.  I work all the measurements out in AutoCad Lite; it's very handy to own such a brilliant drafting program, a legacy of my Survey Drafting days.

The HSTs around the edge are 1.414", which is the long side of 1" HST; it's also the size of the little triangles in the blocks, and the setting triangle blocks. I chose to stay with that size so that it would visually link the border to the blocks.  I couldn't cut that with a rotary cutter, but I have a paper triangle template that I draft up for those sort of strange sizes.

I suppose I could have just gone with a 1.5" HST, but I find that the accuracy I get with the papers really makes those long borders go together easily.  I need a couple hundred units, and I don't want to be trying to fudge inaccurate units together. And the sewing is so quick, just follow the lines.  I did this stack of 30 templates in half an hour, and that's all the triangles I need for the outside border.

Then in another lot of stolen moments I trimmed them, and cut them apart. I don't bother using a rotary cutter to cut those pairs; it's not a line that needs accuracy, so I do it sitting down, with sharp scissors, a cup of coffee and something interesting to watch.  Makes that chore seem pleasurable.

Now it's a matter of  taking the papers off, and pressing those seams open so that they are all nice and flat, ready to sew together.  I can do that in little increments between other jobs, and it never gets too tedious.

The units for the first border are all cut and ready to sew; they are pretty time-consuming too, but once I get into the swing of it I can get a lot done.  I tend to sew them in batches of ten, and that makes it easy to see progress.  I need a couple hundred of these too.

Once I have all these units done there will be the mind-numbing job of making them all fit around the centre blocks.  I've done a rough plan on the computer, but the reality will be different.  The blocks don't measure what they should, the overall measurements of the top are nearly an inch bigger than the drafted version on the computer.  There are a lot seams, and just a tiny bit extra in each block added up to something significant.  I'm going to do my favourite Wing It approach; join the strips at the corners, the way I want them to be, and fudge something in the middle.  Usually taking larger seams between a few of the units will ease in any fullness.  I can't say I'm looking forward to that, but I am really looking forward to having this quilt DONE.  The only way out is through, and I just need to keep working at it.

I will work at it later on; right now I have a date with some seedlings for the autumn garden.  Some outside time is needed, to balance all that inside work.

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I have five long-term UFOs on my list, all at the border stage.  They are packed away in the cupboard and I don't think of them much, but they need to be dealt with.  They are unfinished because the border decisions were just too HARD!  Sometimes a quilt just goes together without a hitch, and sometimes it fights every inch of the way.
I pulled out this project from 2012;

it's taking up two large containers, because I packed away all the fabric I was using and all the fabric I was likely to use, plus the paperwork and photos.  It took me a while to sort it all out and remember what I was aiming for.  Thank heavens I put all my notes in with the top.
I spent hours cutting tiny strips to audition for the pieced borders; nothing was right.  Every piece was either too brown, too pink, too blue, too light, too dark, too bright.  This is why it's been marinating in a box for three years!  On the plus side, now I have all these little strips that are just begging to be used together.  Such lovely fabrics, but none of them are what the quilt needed.

Finally I've come up with a plan. The original quilt had multiple pieced borders, but I couldn't include them all or my quilt would be enormous.

I've sewn the missing corners onto the main part, made some mockups of the border piecing, worked out all the measurements.

I eliminated the  dark hourglass border, and chose to use the HSTs and the squares on point, plus several spacer strips. Now it's time to square up the edges, add the first border and cut out several hundred squares and triangles.

It took most of a day to get this far, and it wasn't a lot of fun;

I made myself keep at it, because packing it away again would just mean a rerun of this day sometime in the future.  I can see why people buy kits, with all the hard decisions made for them.  But I will have a sense of achievement once I've battled all these design elements into submission. I really love the blocks and the fabrics and the memories of this special top, so the border is worth all the effort.  It will be very sweet to cross this off the UFO list.

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My parcel from Hancock's arrived, and it was fun to unpack.  Two things were back-ordered, so the total was 43 yards.  Hancock's are very generous with their cuts, so there was an extra 3 or 4" in the long lengths; I'm putting it in my fabric tally as 43 metres.  I gave two pieces to Mereth, so that took the overall figure down to 39m.  I must have been slightly insane when I ordered that lot!  I was definitely out of control.

I'm not going to feel too bad, because several big pieces are going to become backings

That red paisley is looking very orange in the photo, but it in real life it will be perfect for one of my red and blue quilts.  The wine bottles will go on the back of a quilt for a wine-lover in the family; the other two paisleys would suit a number of my tops, so I'll pull them out and see which ones look best.

Batiks!  I have very few blue batiks, so these will help pad out the stash.  I bought enough of the blue-grey for a border.  Can't wait to start the next batik project.

These blues from Marsha McCoskey are unusual, but they will liven up the blue stash too.

These are mostly 1 yard pieces; there aren't any plans for these yet, but I'm sure they will be starting points for new projects, especially the Betsy Chutchian florals.  Yummy.

This print is so gorgeous I had to get 2 yards; I think the range is La Vie En Rouge.  Maybe it will be a sashing, or alternate blocks, or a border.  I'm super happy to have this on the stash shelf.
So that's my huge extravagance for this year.

It's helpful to take photos of the fabric purchases; later on I will probably forget where all these pieces came from so at least I have recorded it here.  I used to keep a fabric book, but I found it hard to keep it up to date.  And photos don't take up any space on the bookshelves, so I'll probably keep doing it this way.  I just hope I don't have any more gigantic parcels like this one to upset my Fabric Tally!

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I spent a little time yesterday, preparing my new Leader-Ender pieces.
 The leftover 3½" x 1½"scraps were put in a tray along with a heap of 1½" squares, and I'll sew those together one at a time.  This cleared a lot of snippets out from the strip drawer, which is a good thing.

I sewed 1.5" strips onto 3.5" strips.

 dark onto light, and

 light onto dark.

Then I layered them together,

and cut 1½" slices.

Now I have a box of these units, which will be my leader-enders.  I'll sew them all into pairs,
like this,

 and that will make arranging them on the design wall easier.
At a rough count, I would need at least 720 units for a single bed quilt, so there's a lot of stitching to do before I'm anywhere close.  That's fine, I'm in no hurry.

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While I was cleaning out drawers I found a heap of 3.5" strips that needed dealing with, along with  containers of leftovers from two projects.

Those scraps measure 3.5 x 1.5" and are leftover from my Cracker quilt, and a cross quilt.  Time to do something with them instead of putting them back in the drawer.

I'd been thinking of doing a Plus quilt, they are everywhere at the moment, and this quilt plan of Mary's came to mind.  She is stitching it as nine-patches and spacer strips, but it can be pieced entirely out of  strips and squares.  This would be a good pattern for my odd collection of leftovers; I can strip-piece the long scraps, and just sew squares onto the already cut pieces, so it should use up all the leftover bits.

I sewed several strips together, cut them into 1.5" slices and threw them on the design wall.  The dark Plus signs float on a light background, and there are no seams to match.  Cool. They don't look like normal Plus signs now because of the seam allowances, but they will once the rows are sewn together.

 I liked it enough to keep cutting, and then decided to try it with light coloured Plus signs.

I like that too, so this is going to be my new leader-ender for a while.  I will have to sew hundreds of these little units to make a decent size quilt, so I'll be able to mindlessly join them and worry about the placement of them later. I'll decide later if I want light or dark Plus signs; all I need to do now is sew strips to squares.

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Normally we spend at least two months moaning and complaining about the horrible summer weather, but not this year.  There have been horrible days, but not weeks of it like we usually have.  There is only one week of February left, and only three hot days predicted, and then that's the end of summer 2016.  I know, we sometimes have have high temperatures well into April, but I can handle those because Winter is approaching at last and the cool weather is in sight.  The dogs have been much more comfortable this year, being able to stay outside in the shade instead of locked in the A/C.  It's been a lovely summer, compared to some of the shockers we've endured.

I kept thinking about the fabric numbers from my spreadsheet, and wondered what 93metres of fabric actually looked like.  How much have I actually removed from the stash, in terms of sheer bulk?  So I pulled out a heap of pieces that I knew were full FQs, or 1m or 2m cuts.  When I got to 50m the cutting table was full, so I figured I should just imagine two lots of this, gone from my stash. Well Done, Me!

50 metres of fabric

It was an interesting experiment; that is a LOT of fabric to have shifted, but it's a mere fraction of the overall stash.  I would like to keep reducing my fabric on hand, and 50m a year sounds very achievable.  My aim now is to stack up 50m of fabric to sell, or use in backings, or to give away.  I have an Enormous parcel chugging across the seas towards me, and I need to make room for it on the shelves.

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First thing this morning I ran a row of stitching around the edge of the borders of the Sister's Choice, so that all those seams are held secure.  They can come undone so easily while it's being loaded on the longarm, so now I won't have to worry about that.

I'm pleased with how it turned out, but halfway through that pieced border I realised that I could have made a nice crib quilt out of all those 2"squares;

 it was a nice idea, but I have fabric that would have looked just as good.  Why doesn't this sort of thing occur to me Before I start?  Never mind, it's cheerful, big, and most important of all, Finished! Well the top is.
This is the third finish for this year, and a total of 23m of the stash used.  Unfortunately there have been a couple of trips to Spotlight and the Jamestown patchwork shop.  25m has been added; I'm a bit appalled at so much, so soon in the year.  The total is only going to get worse, because I was very, very bad at Hancocks the other day.  I will have to find backings for about 10 quilts to wipe out that fabric debt.  When the parcel gets here I'll be equal parts shocked and happy.

In 2015 I used 126m, and bought 65m.  In 2014 I I used 170m and bought 138. (Really!! 138m!!) So in the last two years I've used 296m and actually decreased the size of the stash by 93m.  (Those numbers include backings and bindings that I made and are stored with the tops.)  In a way it's impressive, but I could have done so much better in the buying department.  As in, not bought so much.....

It's Operation CleanUp here, I have to set the sewing room to rights before I start dragging more fabric out and making another mess.  I'm going to shift a few things around, just because I'm bored  and want to see something new.  It will be the same as the pieced border; I'll get halfway through and think it's a really bad idea, but I'll have to go through with it.  At least it will be easier to vacuum all the hard to reach place while I'm moving furniture.

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I spent a ridiculous amount of time today trying to choose borders for my Scrappy Mountain Majesties quilt.  I pulled dozens of fabrics out of the cupboards and drawers, but nothing seemed perfect.  I even cut and pieced the strips from one fabric, but then I just couldn't bring myself to sew them on.  Mereth's stash was raided, and she gave her opinions, but I still couldn't make a decision.  Finally I chose one, and the strips were cut and attached in half an hour.  It's so annoying that it took me all day to sew on four borders!

 The light fabrics didn't photograph very well, they are more colourful than this photo.  The fluoro light makes it hard to capture the colours accurately; it's a daylight fluoro tube, which seems to confuse the camera. I will see if I can get a better photo down in the workroom tomorrow.

The bright Sister's Choice is finished as well, but I'm too shattered tonight to get it ironed and up on the design wall for a photo.  I'll do that tomorrow.
I have no idea what to sew next, I might just sew some strings together on the Tiffany treadle for some mindless sewing.

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I've been sewing steadily away at my two projects, but neither is anywhere near finished.

 I attached two borders to the Sister's Choice, but there are still two to go.

 I cut twice as many squares as I need, so hopefully there will be plenty of variety; I need to make 3 strips of 40 squares each.  If I concentrated it would be done in an hour, I'm just not very focused lately.

My Scrappy Mountain Majesties blocks have multiplied since I took this photo; I need another 12 blocks and then I'll have enough for a decent size quilt.  I'm determined to just slap two plain fabric borders on them and call them done.  I'm fed up with pieced borders right at this moment.

In an effort to use up the bright fabrics I cut 4.5" strips; haven't decided on a pattern yet, but this is all that's left of most of my pretty modern stuff.  I'm thinking maybe something with rectangles, or big HSTs.   I have some eye-popping brights from a scrap pack, but they are destined for a Chinese Coins with black setting to tone them down a bit. I'm determined to get this stash fabric moving!

I'm loading up a new laptop with all my software, updating old versions and discovering what will and won't run on Windows 10.  It causes a bit of brain fade, all the serial numbers and passwords and user names just blur together after a while.  I'm not keeping up with technology, but I don't think I've been left completely behind.  I'm just trailing after it and whinging 'Why did they have to change Everything!!?' Just when I thought I knew what I was doing.......

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