We're in the ninth month of the year, so it's time to give you Block 9 of the free BOM "Thoughts in Thread" quilt. The focus this month is on "right thoughts", so I have used a pretty clock to depict the theme. There's nothing worse than trusting a time-piece that doesn't keep the correct time! It needs to be right and able to be trusted! So that's the focus - right thoughts being the foundation for right living.
An appliqued clock with some simple stitching and piecing:
As usual, you can find the new block on my website.
This is the last block in the quilt, but come back next month and I will give you some instructions for the borders and binding, plus a quilt label. All the blocks will remain on my website until the end of the year. I have been planning another free BOM quilt for you for next year and some fun things for November and December, so I hope you will keep visiting!
Some friends of ours are being married next Saturday, and I wanted to have a special card to accompany their present. I decided to revisit my parchment skills (or lack thereof) to make them a pretty card. It didn't take me long to remember why I hadn't done any parchment work for a while - sore wrist, aching shoulders, kinked neck. Of course, some of the pens had dried out and I could see I needed some practice to come up to my old standard, but I had to be content with the result. If you don't look too closely, the overall effect isn't too bad:
Two things I do know - the gift (one of my wall quilts) and the card will be one of a kind and the lovely couple are not going to get two the same!
My table runner that gave me all the angst in the previous week came together really well in the end - that is until I did the quilting! I did my best machine quilting ever with a great cable design in the centre, but the design pushed the fabric to the edges and I ended up with waves in the non-quilted area!!! Out it all came! I had another two attempts which were even better quilting, but I ended up pulling them out too! Back to faithful hand quilting. Now I have a runner that I really like and it has turned out beautifully! I never will get this quilting by machine thing!!! Lesson to self - a needle in the hand is worth two in the machine!
Happy stitching!
Val
8 comments:
LoVe the card Val...amazing! :)
Val, thanks again for the BOM. I haven't stitched any blocks yet but have been saving them to do later in the year. I am looking fporward to the quilt label too.
That card is beautiful! Well worth your effort. As for hand quilting, well sometimes we have more control over it than machine quilting. Thanks for showing us all your beautiful things.
I love your new block. The card looks wonderful Val.
Wow - Val - I love that new block, oh I'm so glad winter is almost here and I will have all kinds of time for stitching! It's lovely! Thank you so much! And I'm just in awe at your card, how beautiful.
Were you doing free motion quilting? I've given it up, give me good old hand quilting any day, lol. If I'm in a big hurry I'll use my walking foot, but you can't do designs with that very well.
What a special effort you made to create unique gifts (runner and card) for that couple! I hope they appreciate them. Your BOM is lovely, and I know the whole quilt will look great. As for free motion quilting... I hated it when I first started doing it. But I continued with it, grumbling about it the entire way. But I did gradually improve, but only because I was too cheap to spend the money for a longarm quilter! Once I got past my frustration with myself, my quilting improved. I figured out that success is based on one's attitude. The word for that attitude is perseverance. Now I'm SO glad I MADE myself learn to machine quilt.
Thank you so much for sharing this delightful quilt. I've fallen a bit behind with my version - I'd better get a wriggle on.
Thanks so much for this lovely BOM. One day I will do this....just not right now. I am not at all good with machine quilting but one day I'll figure it out. I prefer hand-quilting but there is not enough time to do it for some projects so I really have to learn to machine quilt! Thanks again!
A delightful block and such a beautiful card.
Post a Comment