WIP Wednesday

Well this is exciting. Lee's Freshly Pieced blog was one of the first I discovered when I started quilting and so I have been reading her WIP Wednesday posts for over 2.5 years. I think?! Have they been going that long? Anyway. I love reading about what others are up to sewing wise and now I can finally link up myself.

So. This week, as well as setting up my blog, I have been slowly working on my Playground quilt from Simply Retro. For Christmas I got absolutely none of the quilting books on my Amazon wish list. Not a single one. So I treated myself to a few, including one by the very lovely Camille Roskelley of Thimble Blossoms patterns and Bonnie & Camille fabric fame. She really is one of my favourite designers and I am so in love with Swoon, but the Simply Retro book contains some fun and more straight forward patterns. I had a part used layer cake of Happy-go-lucky fabric which I had pulled some squares from to make a baby quilt for tiny girl. The Playground pattern needs just 36 layer cake squares so I grabbed that and added a couple of extra prints from my stash (diluting and working outside of fabric lines is a current goal you see).

Decisions, decisions

Both my husband and my lovely peeps on Instagram agreed that Kona Olive was the bold way to go background wise so I set to piecing these blocks last week

Had a little assistance with the layout.

Went away all weekend, got blog obsessed but have been piecing them into rows today.

I have to confess I am a little lukewarm on this quilt at the moment. I love all the fabrics, I love the simple block pattern. But some blocks I love:

 

 


Others, not so much:

 


I am just having to trust it to come together beautifully. And wondering whether to add sashing between the rows too? Not like me to go off pattern piste, I'm a natural rule follower you know!


Of course no one ever has just one wip on the go, right? I have an ongoing hand project to do during long car journeys, while sitting in the car waiting for the baby to wake up and on evenings away from home, mostly to stop me wasting my life playing candy crush saga on my phone at such times. My preference is to bind a quilt, but I need to make one first so I've been slogging on with this.

You may recognise this as the April block from last year's Pile o Fabric skill builder BOM. What a wip that is, I am hopelessly behind but really learning new things. Mostly at the moment I am learning that I don't think EPP is for me. I know, what a thing to say, it's very popular at the moment and much loved by many but I don't think it's my bag. So it has taken me weeks (months?!) to sew all those little hexies into columns and now I have the uninspiring task of sewing the columns together.

I need to get that playground quilt ready to bind, don't I?

Anyway I do love the look of the chev n hex block so I shall persevere.

So basically this week I've been working on two projects that I am somewhat ambivalent about. Hence the new blog, you see? I'll try to do better next week!

Okay in the interests of transparency let's get up a full start of February WIP list.

Playground quilt. To piece, baste, quilt, bind.
Skill builder BOM. Slow progress.
Lucky stars BOM. No progress.
Festive giant churn dash quilt. Just 2/12 blocks made but hey, I have till December.
STQB (Siblings Together Quilting Bee) February block. Fabrics arrived today so need to get this done.
Sonia's Valentine's knicker swap. I am busy stalking my swap partner ....

I think that's it.

Linking up with Lee, squeeeeee!