FMQ tablemat

And the short update to the latest post. I finished the binding for the tablemat I sewed and now it decorates my table. I made this one entirely from the scraps. The grey piece is linen that I bought once to some embroidery project but I didn't do it in the end.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I wanted to try free motion quilting and made this tablemat for that. I can tell now that it is very, very hard, but also after a while of quilitng I had a feeling that the sewing machine and the needle starts to listen to me :). So, I guess I'll need to think of some new project for practicing. Maybe, this time some smaller potholders or rug mugs...

I'm linking this one to JAQS Made by Me linky party:

June FNSI results

I still don't have the Internet but it won't stop me to post the results here as I promised :). I decided to finish the work on the tablemat. I did all the layers some time ago and pinned them together but I couldn't move on with quilting them. The main point to make this tablemat was to exercise and try free motion quilting. I did some of that on other fabric pieces to get a feeling but still I was worried how it would come out. But, if you don't try you're not going to be better, so finally I started free motion quilting on the tablemat. Last Friday night I finished that all.

SewCalGal blog has the year long event called Free-Motion Quilt Challenge. Each month there a different expert showing how to learn and make various free-motion patterns. In January there was this leaf pattern shown and I thought it would be good to make on my piece:

Here's the centre square sewn together

and the whole tablemat:

Now, I need to make the binding and it will be ready.

FNSI - after party

This was the first time I took part in Friday Night Sew In but for sure not the last one. It's great opportunity to speed up with sewing. I have two things ongoing that need my sewing machine and I decided to do this:


It 's the last of 4 tablemats that I have to quilt. I didn't do all the quilting last night, but I finished 4 squares where during the week I couldn't do more than one square a day. So, hopefully I'll be able to finish it this week.











Another fun part of FNSI is that it's not over. Now, I'm going to check what other folks did. There were above 100 participants, so there's A LOT to see. Cheers :)!

Quilting around the house

There is not a lot going on with embroidery in my house recently, but there is quite a lot with my sewing machine. So I thought I'd share with you a couple of pictures of what I'm doing. Not sure if I mentioned here already but I fell in love with quilting and now I'm juggling bewteen this and embroidery whenever I have some spare time.

So, quilting - since some time I've been doing the tablemats. Two of them are finished, two of them in the progress. This is how it looks like when done. They are very very far away from perfection, but I'm pleased with them - after all I did them myself :). After joining the blocks I realized that adding the sashing would make them better, but I can live without it.

Second thing I'm doing at the same time is the P2 Quilt Along Project. I haven't heard much about Quilt Alongs and I must admit it's great thing for me. I don't know how it is for you, but it's hard for me to motivate myself and keep on doing things sometimes. So such events are just perfect for me, because they keep me going on without much break :). I was afraid if i could keep the pace and sew the blocks as they come out on the blog, but so far I'm following (heh, probably that's because they had some break now).


Here's the blog Patchwork_2 if you'd like to have a look at this. There's also Flickr page that you can view here . As I'm looking through various pages I can see there is a lot of such events happening and this is just awesome. I'm learning a lot now and just keep practicing, which is so important. I also found Stitch Along event in one of the blogs and probably I'll join this too. It's great to see how huge variety of stithes people can do from one pattern.