Frogs & Snails, Free Motion practice and other random sewing news...

This is a bit of a mixed bag (and a lucky bag for one super lovely bloggy friend) of my sewing news for the last week. Bear with me, its all a bit random!

First up, another weekend, another quilt top! I'm not getting a whole pile of time to spend sewing these days, but when I do get to it I am being super productive. No faffing about, just the very model of efficiency! So, here is the latest sewing result - my Frogs and Snails quilt for a new baby boy. I'm making this one for my MIL who wants a present for her grand-nephew. Its a small, cot size quilt and a little bit akin to an I-Spy quilt, as a lot of the half square triangles have interesting detail for a baby boy. There are owls (of course!), cars, traffic lights, buses, whales, bugs, kangaroos, spots, stripes, stars and of course a frog and some snails :-) No puppy dog tails though!

I could have gone a number of different ways with my HSTs in terms of layout, but after playing around for a little bit yesterday afternoon with different combinations, I thought this worked best and I really like it. I have a lovely soft piece of blue and white gingham print fabric for the back and i nf the gods smile on me, I might even get it basted tonight.

I'm also working on cutting two other quilt tops - one for a baby girl in red, pink and aqua with these lovely fabrics:

And one for a baby boy in these lovely orange, brown and green fabrics!

 
Also on the agenda this morning was catching up on Cindy's free motion practice-along so I could link up to Free Motion Friday, even if I am a little late. I watched the video and got my little scraps of fabric and batting ready. And then I almost collapsed laughing when I saw the result.

 

Bloody, horrendously awful. You know I like to show you my craft fails from time to time, this one is definitely up there in the rankings - serious wobbling, stitch length all over the place, rubbish tension (look at the pic of the back) and general crapness.

I even made a 2nd attempt.

 

Its a little better, but not by more than about 2%. And that's because I moved the fabric around at the end of each wave so I was working towards myself, to give me more control. And I remembered to breath! Still didn't work :-)  Moral of the story? Need to practice!!! Now, I do think I should probably go a little bigger on the fabric I'm using - there's not much scope for control on a scrap this size. And I need to look at my tension issues, so the manual will have to come out for next week. But it was definitely fun and I can't wait to try this week's drop art. Think I will have to go reading up a little before tackling it. Because, imagine if I could do it? How cool would it be!

In other news, I am getting started with my stalking of my partner for the Modern Christmas table runner swap. I pulled out my stash of Christmas fabrics from last year - aren't they nice? But I might need to add some to them to get a colour palette my partner LOVES, off to do my research this afternoon.

And I got CeLynn's fabrics for October in Sew Bee Blissful. She wants us to make these super cute owl blocks, I can't wait to get started on them. Really love her fabric choices:

Last, but by no means least, I want to say thank you to everyone for linking up to my Summer Sewing wrap up! It was amazing to see what you all got done, isn't it the best feeling to look back at all your achievements? I've had a few requests for a Winter sewing list to keep you all on track - are you interested? If so, I'll get working on it and post it sometime in the next week or so, just let me know in a comment. Now, back in May I did promise a little giveaway for people who participated and I have consulted with Mr. Random. I had 7 people complete from start to finish (love you all!) and of these he picked:

 who is my lovely bloggy friend Susan! Susan, I've emailed you :-) If you haven't checked out Susan's blog before, you are missing out. She is super talented, and very funny, and she is swap mama to the above mentioned Modern Christmas Table Runner Swap, which is an inspired idea. Go get over there and say hi!

So, there's my random news. Hope you're having a lovely weekend!