Weekend of Sewing at the Seaside

Well last weekend I had a great time ensconced in a beachfront house with 4 other lovely ladies armed with a stack of projects and my trusty sewing machine!  We were at Wallaroo in country South Australia and as luck would have it the weather decided it was time for spring and out burst the sunshine!

I drove up with my bestie Kerry in her cute new green Ford Fiesta (nicknamed Juicy) and we arrived right at sunset which was stunning - sorry no photos, we were too busy admiring it to find the camera!  As soon as we arrived we had dinner which was a lovely minestrone soup made by my sister-in-law Kerrie who had arrived earlier in the afternoon, along with her friends Sue and Pauline.  Yes that's right, out of 5 people in the house we had two Kerry/Kerries and two Sues. Pauline was feeling a little left out without another Pauline in the house!

After a quick clean up and bedmaking I set up my machine and got stuck right in.  I started by sewing together all 16 of my Star Surround blocks.  Then I laid them out on the floor to decide on a layout.  When I started this quiltalong I planned to make one quilt using all 16 blocks like this:

Once I laid them out though it seemed a bit large for a lap quilt and I have since found out my niece is having a baby so I thought maybe I'd make a baby quilt like this:

 That would leave me with these blocks for a lap quilt (plus one left over):

Well, I couldn't quite decide which way to go so I decided I wouldn't put them together until I thought about it a bit more.

So on to a new project.  I won a charm pack of Marmalade last year and hadn't quite got around to using it so I dug that out and made some pinwheels.

I'm kind of thinking I might make some placemats or a table runner but I think I might need some extra fabric before I put them together.  These didn't take all that long to put together as I used the quick method of making HSTs by taking two charm squares with right sides together, running a 1/4" seam all around the edges and slicing diagonally in four. Easy as, as long as you're careful with the edges being on the bias.

On Saturday Kerry and I started the day with a long beach walk and enjoyed the sunshine.  We headed back to get stuck into some work and the others headed off to the local quilt shop for some essential supplies.  I resisted the temptation as last year I got waylaid at the quilt shops and it took way longer than I planned!

Hmmm, something's missing in this photo - oh that's right, they're at the quilt shop!

Next project I worked on was quilting this quilt for my Aunty Betty.  I was motoring along (although as its all pebbling, I wasn't exactly ripping along) but was having some thread issues with one of my reels having several joins in it.  Not happy about that, its not what you expect from a reel of cotton is it?

  I persevered with it until the end of Saturday but decided to work on something else on Sunday morning.

This was the view from my sewing machine - not exactly tough conditions!

Sue was working on her first quilt which was a snakes and ladders quilt made up of embroidered pieces Kerrie had made for her.  We showed her how to stitch it all together, add borders, sandwich, quilt and bind and despite grumbling about the quilting and not being sure it was her thing, once she finished she loved it and so did we!

On Sunday morning she started wondering aloud about making a quilt using some fabric she had at home and we knew we had turned another person to the dark quilting side!

Here is Kerry (my friend) working on some scrapbooking and Kerrie (my sister in law) working on an embroidered item.

Pauline was getting busy with some tasty goodies in the kitchen on Saturday night:

while her machine was busy embroidering some teddy bears for a quilt! (I wish I'd remembered to take some photos of the finished blocks, they were very cute!)

Sunday morning I worked on using some of my scraps in these blocks:

We had a wonderful weekend with loads of laughs, chatting and stitching and we're all organised to do it again in March next year - can't wait!

One last photo - sunset on Saturday night!

Thanks for reading my blog today,