Happy New Year (and a bit of sewing!)

Well as I write this it is New Year's Eve here in Adelaide, South Australia.  My husband and I aren't much interested in the whole drunken revellery thing so we are at home in the cool of the airconditioner, important as it was 37 degrees Celcius here today (a fairly typical Adelaide New Year's Eve).

I realised I haven't shared any of the sewing I have been up to in the last week, I think I've been busy enjoying being home on holidays!

Firstly I added an extra row around my smaller Star Surround quilt to square off the diamonds around the edge as I felt the half triangles didn't look quite finished. I was going to add another round of plain white but I don't think I will now after all. I'm planning on binding it in a scrappy binding using the fabrics in the quilt. 

 

This will be a quilt for my hubby's niece who is due to have her first bubs on 1st February.  We do know it will be a girl so I think this will work. She's a design teacher so I hope she likes it!  I'm going to quilt it with Aurifil thread once I get my hands on some (hopefully this week) and see what all the fuss is about. I'm hearing lots of positive comments so thought I should give it a try.

I also whipped up a few more blocks for my rainbow broken herringbone quilt.  First some greens:

 

Then a blue block:

and another purple:

Here they are all together and I've worked out that I think I need a real dark blue/indigo block and also either a very deep, dark green block and a pale green or two dark green blocks. I'm a bit short on those colours so its time for a visit to the fabric shop to see what's around. A fat quarter or six should help things along!

Over the last couple of months I had been sitting out of the QBSA monthly block swaps but I'm back into it in January and have two partners this month. Both want blue and white blocks so that's handy and both are making quilts for charity so I thought I would make two for each to get them there a little faster.  So this afternoon I had a fossick in the fabric and found some nice blues and have cut up my pieces ready to stitch together next chance I get (Sorry, forgot to take a photo!).

I've also been busy cutting up the last pieces I need for my version of Castle Ceiling by Leesa Chandler (from Australian Patchwork & Quilting Vol 14 No 4 May 2006) which I'm handstitching in blues and yellow.

I need 10 more blue Dresden blocks and 20 more yellow blocks and I can start joining the blocks together, yay! (The colours are closer to the photo above, the one below looks a bit washed out.)

This is the Leesa's quilt:

Today Brian's Dad was taken to hospital from the nursing home and we've just had a call to say that he has a clot on his lung so not terrific news. Hard to say where things will go from here so we'll just have to wait and see.  Given that he's not overly co-operative (and that's an understatement believe me) about helping himself by coughing to keep his lungs clear I can't see the outcome being particularly good, certainly not in the longer term.  Time will tell.

Lastly I'd like to finish this post by saying thank you to everyone who follows my little blog, I relish reading your comments.  I love being part of the online quilting and blogging community and making friends all over the world!

Wishing you all a happy and prosperous 2014!