February goals

Having been back at work for 3 weeks I do feel like I need another holiday, and that is despite two Public Holidays thrown in! A week of hui (meetings) with the nationwide Raranga Matihiko team, followed by our annual Waitangi Day festivities at the Waitangi Treaty Grounds PLUS  the opening of our new museum Te Rau Aroha have taken their toll already - and we have barely started teaching...

Luckily, life is not just about work and we have enjoyed two weekends of camping over the last month. This summer seems endless at this stage, and while the lack of rain is starting to cause serious problems for many communities, thankfully we are still fine at this stage. The pool is a balmy 30degC (without any form of heating), so we are really enjoying ourselves at the moment. Our oldest DS has settled into the Finnish weather and his uni routine, and the two younger ones have returned to high school, so things are getting back into some resemblance of normal.

I hadn't quite gotten to the point of setting monthly goals in my Happy New Year post. I can see from January that I will need to include small, achievable goals, especially as work gets busier. These are my February goals:

Metrorings: Finish quilting the feathers between the melon shapes (14 to go)
Patchworkcity: Prepare the sashing strips
Rainbow at Sea: Finish piecing the six 'orange' blocks
Linedried: Piece the three larger blocks for Section 2; make a decision on the smallest blocks (follow pattern or substitute?)
Summer Sampler 2017: Decide on fabrics / colours
Venus: Keep on working away on this, 1 block per 'sewing session'
Sparkler: Cut enough white 2 1/2" strips to piece another 3 blocks (which will bring total to 10)
Celebration / Perseverance: SID around all centre blocks

The Scraptherapy top and the Footstool keep on getting put off, but I will keep them on my list so they are on my radar.

Some of my progress to date:
Linedried

Section 1 is pieced but not sewn together as I want to be able to swap blocks across the top.

The larger blocks for Section 2 are prepared.
Missing are two of the smallest size blocks:
At 3" finished I'm not sure yet if I am up for the challenge or if I will substitute them

I feel I am starting to get better at piecing the hourglass blocks: I had struggled getting them to fit and sit flat when I realised that my 1/4" seams were too generous. I have since corrected my needle position, have started starching the fabric before cutting and changed my method. Rather than cutting triangles, I make two HSTs by putting two squares on top of each other, I mark a diagonal with my Hera marker and then stitch to either side. Cut along the diagonal to end with two HSTs, press seams to the darker side, put both squares back together, right sides facing but one square rotated by 90º and  voila! you get beautiful hourglass blocks:) Thanks as usual goes to Suz who always has a solution to my sewing conundrums :)

Sparkler

Seven blocks so far

It's almost too easy to put this together; I'll stick with light blue, dark blue and aqua for this quilt and work on distributing the colours when all 20 blocks are pieced. There are many beautiful examples of this online, but the limited colour way works with my goal of reducing stash and scraps. One of the few patterns I could well imagine repeating...

Celebration / Perseverance:

So far just some SID

I have to keep on reminding myself that I don't need to love every project: At this stage I don't love this one. I'm not in love with the feel of the material or with the colours, and this is the second quilt I'm using the new to me cotton-poly batting which, after years of 100% cotton or cotton-bamboo mixes, I struggle with. Just looking at it now I could imagine leaving it as a simple SID, but I will try to get push through that and make this my ruler quilting practice.

Hope you have your monthly goals sorted? Happy Sewing!