Not paying attention

You might think that for someone who finishes only a handful of quilts in a year, the moment of completion would be something to celebrate.  I certainly thought that.  Except...some time round about October of last year, I finished a quilt and completely forgot about it.  No blog mention, not even a dodgy photo on instagram.  In fact, the only reason I know when it was finished is the date stamp on the photos. Go figure.

Anyhow, here is my poor, sadly overlooked quilt, which was called In For a Penny (on account of the Coins).

Six shirts (if you want a reminder, you can see some of them here) plus scraps from my big box of random bits, pieced mostly as little strip sets, with the odd hourglass or pinwheel thrown in when I got bored.

Much of the back started life as a front, but at some point I realised I wasn't inclined to quilt it, so took to it with the scissors.  Some of it is in other quilt fronts now, and the rest has made this rather  satisfactory back. 

It was pieced between the end of November 2019 and 3rd March 2020, so it was my final quilt before lockdowns came and ate the rest of the year.  I have to confess that I don't know when I started quilting it, but it was finished on 17th October 2022, so I guess I would have started some time that summer.  

The wadding is organic cotton,the thread is perle cotton, just a random selection that seemed to go, and it is quilted with straight, vertical lines.The binding is one of the last Oakshott cottons that I have been hoarding for so long it's stopped being funny. It was just the right mix of yellow and pink tones.

It might seem, from my utter neglect of it, that I don't much care for this quilt but that's not the case.  In fact I like it a lot. I especially like the interruptions made by the hourglasses and pinwheels, the tiny bits of red and that bottom left-hand corner, which has a whole curvy thing of its own going on.  

And just like that...

This one is done (if only my quilting was progressing in a similar fashion).  I ran out of virtually all my original fabrics and the, to continue the theme, of most of my replacements, though to be fair they were only very small scraps.  If I had more I might have made this just a tiny bit bigger, but I haven't, so I'm calling it a finish.  And I'm fine with that, because I like this a lot.

Sadly I still can't get a really good photo that shows the fabrics off, but this is the best I could manage.  Maybe once it's quilted I'll do some close-ups.  

The hourglasses in this are a nod to the latest AHIQ challenge, though I am going to do something more hourglass-y next, or that's the plan.  In the meantime, though, on with the quilting.

Not even scraps now

This is officially the closest I've ever come to running out of fabric completely.  Of the fabrics I started with I am out of all but three (the light brown with a white spot, the grey/brown with the animals and flower design and the cream background with different coloured spots).  I am also down to the very last scraps of the black and white stripe.  Not even scraps left to piece of anything else, though I have a handful of strip sets still to use.

As you can see from this photo, I still have a way to go (I'm aiming to cover that last tile on the right).

Luckily all the times when I have run short before have provided good practice and I am not panicking. 

I had already added one floral into the mix and though I am reluctant to cut into any more yardage I have had a good rummage through my scraps and come up with these.

At the moment the yellow and the smaller check have not been pressed into use but the other three have.

This is the one area I've worked on that includes all the new additions.

It won't be a seamless transition, but I feel happy that the new bits sit happily enough with the feel of what I have already and should, just, be enough to see me home.  I am piecing much more carefully now, so thinking about what I need next and making for a specific space rather than putting together strip sets in advance and then playing around with them.  

Slightly optimistically I had set myself the aim of finishing this before the end of the month, but it will be done not too far into March.

A brief update on the hand quilting seems overdue too.  I am still quilting (or not) my second lighthouses.  I'm not sure why I'm not feeling the love for this as I work on it - I still like the piecing but am so not into quilting it.  However, and in my own defence, I did quilt a whole lego quilt in two months over December and January, so progress is being made one way or another.

Two more columns and bad weather

It seems like this quilt is being made two columns at a time.  That seems to be the most I have managed before running out of a) time or b) fabric.  Here's the current progress.

To get to a width I am happy with I need to cover one more floor tile, which I reckon will probably take four, possibly five, more columns.  In the normal scheme of things this would mean a finished top by the end of next week, since this week is fully occupied, but we shall see.

Currently we are more preoccupied with the weather than anything else.  We live about as close to a river as is possible - I've left the blurry edge of the window in so that you can get an idea.

We are in no danger of flooding, thankfully, so watching the river do its thing is fascinating but not scary.  To give you an idea of how high the water has been, the picture below is of the weir.  There should be seven steps but only the sill is visible, to the right.  Beyond our river is a canal, and then everything else that is under water is field.  This is the highest it has been in years.

Of course it's much worse elsewhere, but it is a reminder of how extreme weather is becoming.