Cuzco is finished!
Cuzco was actually finished about a month ago but I didn't get a chance to take photos.
Since you last saw it, it has been quilted:
Ooops!
It has had the binding sewn down:
And it even had a label made for it using my lovely new machine:
Yep, I decided to call it Cuzco. I'd been calling it Cuzco since the day it was cut out and no amount of trying to think of a fancy pants name paid off, so Cuzco it is!
This quilt took me a year and a half to make, though I pretty much only worked on it at Guild meetings, which used to be every six weeks, but then changed to monthly, so I don't think that's too bad!
The pattern is Stained Glass by Sarah at Narcoleptic in a Cupboard. She ran it as a QAL in 2012 (you know me, always up there with the latest trends!) and the pattern is free and very easy to follow if you're interested in making one. The fabric is a F8 bundle of Cuzco by Kate Spain that I nabbed on an Instagram destash. I used Kona Steel for the sashing and binding. I quilted it myself using the Angles and Circles pattern from Leah Day's 365 Quilt Designs book.
The back was pieced out of necessity. I used a large piece of one of the Cuzco prints (I'd bought 3 yards following Amy Butler's instructions when I made her Weekender Bag, this was the lining, and it was far, far too much), a large piece of a Klona grey in a similar shade to Steel, a strip of pieced leftovers and a piece of blue/purple fabric I happened to have hanging around that I thought might go!
Then I stitched a label on my Janome, blanket stitched it in place by hand using pink embroidery floss, and took a picture of it upside down.
It says:
Cuzco (with a pink heart)
aka The Guild Quilt
my name
2014-2015
That there is my real name, not the spy name I usually use on t'internet, so if you're really curious, you can have an upside down squint and find out who I REALLY am!
I'd like to wish you all a Happy New Year's Eve. Ours will be spent in front of the TV, cheese board on the coffee table. Wine for Mr CA and coffee for me. It was going to include Junior CA but I told her our plans and that I'd probably be in bed by 10 and she elected to go to a party at her friend's house instead. She is 16 so I don't blame her.
Happy New Year everyone, I hope it is happy and healthy for you all. I hope to see you around the Blogosphere in the new year and hope that you'll still come to visit me. I don't have any resolutions or special plans, I'm going to try to concentrate on being happy.
I have the best parents in the entire world. No dispute. And it's not just because they bought me an amazing new sewing machine, they'd still win the award for best parents ever.
This little baby arrived at my house on my birthday. It's my birthday and Christmas present for the next 40 years.
It's a Janome Atelier 5, bought at the Festival of Quilts as a bargain. I am madly in love with it.
Impossible to get a decent photo as it's set up in front of the window. You can click the link above to see it on the Janome website. I've been sewing on a Husqvarna Viking E116 for the past 5 years, an entry level machine, so there is so much to love about this new baby.
Auto needle down
Auto thread cutter
Knee lift
Those three things would be enough for me to be honest, but it also has 8" of harp space, a trillion fancy stitches, a maximum speed slider which I think will be great for FMQ, and you can move the needle to the side in millimetres. Oh yes, I love this baby.
I also got a free gift of a case of Mettler thread, this case is double sided so there's twice as much thread as you see here and my machine likes Mettler. I suppose I'm going to have to give Aurifil another try now I have a new machine too, maybe I'll find out what you've all been raving about!
Jane Galley - thanks for leaving me so many lovely comments. I lost your email address when I got a new phone and as you're no-reply I can't respond. Could you leave your email address in a comment - I won't publish it.
Now I call myself a multi-crafter, so really that should involve the most crafty of crafts. The stereotype of crafts, and of old ladies. I suppose I am sort of an old lady, well I feel like one with my lack of teeth. I took lovely mum and mum-in-law to deepest darkest Derbyshire for a one day course making willow baskets.
There were long sticks of damp willow, secateurs and pointy tools.
We started with the base. The spokes start off like this, 3 jammed inside another 3. Then the weaving begins.
Wow, it was tough. The willow branches used for the base were pretty thick and not very pliable, so weaving round and keeping them pushed down was a bit of a fight.
There were a few different colours of willow available, so as soon as I could, I swapped to the green which was much easier to weave. It hasn't stayed green though, now my basket is home and in a warm house, they've turned light brown.
With the base finished, the spokes are bent upwards and tied in place. A weight is placed inside to hold the base down as we worked. It's at this point that you could shape the basket, but I was having such a struggle keeping the spokes all tied up that I didn't even attempt shape!
I abandoned the willow used for the base altogether as it was too hard to weave, instead I did stripes of the green and a dark brown. It was fun. I did enjoy doing this part. I weaved and weaved until the class was nearly over.
Then the top was kind of plaited to finish it off and all ends were cut off. Ta-dah! Not a bad effort eh? It's not particularly round, or particularly neat, but I'm pretty proud of it. The one in the background to the left is mum-in-law's and the one in the background to the right is my mum's handbag!
Last week I showed you the centre of a new quilt that I'm making. The pattern is NY Beauty Circle of Flying Geese, which you can buy here. I spent ages laying out fabrics to follow the colour wheel, then cutting rectangles out ready to paper piece.
Then I paper pieced.
This is the first time I've used a low volume bacground, and I really hope it's going to work. As I'm putting the blocks together, it doesn't look good, but somehow it seems to all come together when each section is done.
Having finished the four sections of flying geese, I started on the pointy bits. And made a mistake. See it? There was no way I was unpicking that lot or cutting rectangles to start again, so I chopped the end off the pattern and washi taped it to the beginning!
You can see it in the second low volume section, but I think it will be pretty unnoticeable when the whole quilt comes together.
A month or so ago I wrote a post about a ceramics class that wonderful mum and I had attended with Katie Almond. We made a two tier cake stand. You can see the process post here. We picked them up a few weeks later and assembled them. Here is mine.
It's sewing themed as it's going to live in my craft room, holding sewing notions. Nope, no cake is going to grace this stand. I don't bake.
I tied the little "sew" tag on with a piece of ribbon that matches the colour scheme of aqua, navy and red.
It took me ages to make and put on all those buttons round the edge!
I am really pleased with how it turned out. I love Katie's style of ceramics and I don't think I did a bad job here.
Wow, what a horrific week or so I've had! It started a few weeks ago with a broken tooth (which I choked on!). I made a dentist appointment - the first appointment they had was 4 weeks away. Then 2 Fridays ago, the pain started. Wow, such pain. Saturday morning saw me at the Walk In Centre to see the emergency dentist. He pulled the tooth out. The following week was all pain. So Friday saw me back at the Walk In Centre. She pulled another tooth out. Today? Pain. At this rate I'll have no teeth left.
But you didn't come here to read me whinging about the dentist, you came to see my SAL update. Here's where I was three weeks ago:
I had high hopes of getting lots done, and I didn't do too badly considering I didn't stitch at all for one week as the pain was too bad. Here we are now:
A fair bit of skirt done there, but I've probably ruined my chances of getting this done by the end of the year!
I'm sewing along as part of a SAL, you can go and see what the other participants have been up to here:
Claire, Avis, Gun, Carole, Alison, Jule, Elizabeth, LucyAnn, Kate, Cathy, Jess and Jacqui
