Piecing Playing & Prepping

After hubby and I had prepared, cooked, eaten and cleaned up a big Father's Day brunch for the family I had some time for piecing, playing & prepping. I had previously prepared a block for my Morrell quilt as I was lucky enough to attend a 'catch-up' class with Di Ford (Hall) at my local patchwork shop, Needles and Pins in Warrandyte last week. It was a great opportunity to get re-motivated with the Sarah Morell quilt and I wanted to learn hand piecing as I'd never done this before. Some of the blocks seemed too difficult to machine piece so I had become a bit stuck with this quilt.

I learnt that the the pinning is very important. Love those small applique clover pins. When I started doing this on the bus on Friday I ended up with pins in my jacket sleeve so that I could easily keep pinning and unpinning. I need to get one of those wrist pin-cushions!

The way you need to open up and unfurl the seams and points on the wrong side is also something I'm learning.

I am happy with how this is turning out so far and I can see how addictive hand piecing can become. Now I don't know why I baulked at the thought of it for so long?

Here are some of my Morrell quilt blocks that I machine pieced...

I also did some playing with fabric for the 2nd block from the Chester County Criswell quilt - 'Elizabeth Cowan' , using leftovers from the Morrel. I'm going to use blue instead of green and add bits of yellow/cheddar when I can.

I did some more playing with fabric for my 12 Days of Christmas quilt. I got these ....

...down to these fabrics...

for the 7 swans...

Then my light globe died so I couldn't quite finish prepping this block but hey I've got plenty to work on with these 3 projects and others that I haven't admitted to yet.
Cheers
Carole