Hand Stitching Progress

I've been stitching my Shoo Fly Garden blocks for a few months now, so today felt like a good time to take them all out and see what I have. 

This is what the finished throw size quilt will eventually look like. Emphasis on eventually!

That's 154 flowers made of ½" hexies, hand stitched to their backgrounds and with black snowball corners machine stitched. I'm nowhere close to that yet!

So far, I have 15 finished blocks, plus another 2 that have half their corners sewn on. I've been using these as leaders and enders, doing one corner at a time as I've been doing other piecing.

I have another 25 flowers stitched to their backgrounds and awaiting corners. I'm using mostly tone-on-tone white fabrics for the backgrounds, with some solid white thrown in, too.

And I have another 23 flowers stitched together. Pinned to the design wall like this, they remind me of insect specimens 😆

That's a total of 65 flowers, so I'll still be basting and stitching these for a while yet! This is my travel project, though I've worked on it at home now and then, too, mostly while talking to my mom, Aiden, or Zach on the phone, or when we have company.

If you want to make a Shoo Fly Garden quilt of your own, the free tutorial is here.

My other big hand stitching project hasn't received as much attention this year, though I have made progress. I'm hand quilting my Hexie Rainbow using Aurifil 12 wt. thread and I'm now working on the last line of the yellow quilting. Each of the coloured rings of the rainbow gets four lines of quilting and the black rings get two lines of quilting, on the inside and outside edges of the hexies. This morning I set myself a mini goal of having this last line of yellow finished before the end of the year.

The black thread pretty much disappears into the black fabrics. The coloured threads are easier to see, though they still blend in on some of the fabrics.

All of the quilting shows up on the blue backing, though!

It's really hard to get a good picture, but I love how the rainbow is appearing on the back. The texture is fabulous, too!

Both projects are obviously not going to be finished anytime soon, which is fine by me. I'll keep picking away at them and it'll be fun to see where I am this time next year 😊

Cross Purposes in Make Modern

This post contains affiliate links, which means I may earn a commission if you make a purchase after clicking on a link. This does not affect the price you pay. Thank you for your support!

A new issue of Make Modern magazine is out now, including my Cross Purposes quilt! There's so much fun diagonal movement in this baby quilt!

When Paul and I went to a local trail to take these pictures back in September, I already had the pattern written and the diagrams for it created. This is a square quilt, so it's not immediately obvious that there is a top side, but if you look at the diagonal lines, they're different going from bottom right to top left and from bottom left to top right. It's not like looking at it one way would be wrong, just that I needed the pictures to match the way the diagonal lines went in the pattern. Of course, I completely forgot about that while we were out taking pictures. It wasn't until we were home and I was editing the pictures that I realized the quilt was rotated 90° from the pattern. Sigh. My first thought was that we'd need to go out and take new pictures, but a few minutes later, I realized that all I needed to do was rotate the diagrams in the pattern and then they'd match 😆 Problem solved!

I used Northcott Chroma fabrics, with Colorworks white for the background. Blender fabrics are my favourite, and I love the variation in colour in the Chroma fabrics.

I originally designed Cross Purposes during the 2024 Stash Artists BOM. Each month of 2024, I shared a block with members, along with a few different quilt designs using the block, and the Crossing block was one of the blocks. In Cross Purposes, I paired it with a four patch as the alternating block. Actually, 8 Point Meadow, which was in the previous issue of Make Modern, was also designed for the same reason. There may be a couple of other designs in that folder just waiting for their turn to be made!

I love that the Crossing block is designed so that the lines don't match up at the corners. You don't have to worry about matching those points!

I used one of my (many) off-cuts of Warm and Natural batting for this baby quilt. Most of my batting scraps are too small to make piecing them together into bigger battings practical, but this one was the perfect size without needing to be pieced. And don't worry, I'll be doing a Mini of the Month series with the Stash Artists members in 2026, so I'll still be using those smaller batting scraps!

I quilted it with my go-to double loop design using Aurifil 50 wt 2021. I love the extra movement the curvy quilting gives the straight lines of the piecing.

I debated between the light teal and the purple for the binding, but in the end the purple won out. The biggest reason the purple won was that I used the light teal as the backing and I wanted the binding to show on the back, too.

Our trail doesn't look much like this now. We've had a lot of wind the past few weeks, so all the trees are bare. That means there's a lot less colour, but it also opens up the view to the water in places. 

If you want to make your own Cross Purposes baby quilt (or any of the other fabulous quilts in this issue), get your copy of Make Modern issue 67 here. Or subscribe and get a new issue full of great patterns and articles every other month!

Scrappy Triangles Baby Quilt

Welcome to another TGIFF party! In case you didn't know, TGIFF stands for Thank Goodness It's Finished Friday, but for this week I might need to add an extra F for the word finally! 

In May of 2022, I wrote a blog post that started, "Way back in 2011 I bought the November/December issue of Fons and Porter's Love of Quilting magazine and it had the pattern for this gorgeous scrappy quilt called Scrappy Triangles, designed by Jean Nolte." I then went on to describe where I was with my Scrappy Triangles quilt and that I had decided to make 2 baby quilts instead of a throw size like in the magazine. Well, here I am, 3 years after that post, and 14(!) years after I started cutting squares for the HSTs, and I finally have a finished Scrappy Triangles baby quilt 🎉🎉🎉 

Sometime in the early part of this year, I basted this quilt together at the same time I basted another quilt (though I can't remember which one), with the intention of quilting it soon after. Obviously that didn't happen! It has been sitting on the bed in the sewing room, just patiently waiting.

When it came time to write my project list for WIPS-B-GONE, I put this quilt right at the top of the list. When the challenge started, I was piecing the blocks for the cover quilt for the next Stash Artists pattern (which releases to members on Monday). I only have one sewing machine, and I don't like to be constantly switching back and forth between having it set up for piecing and for free motion quilting, so this quilt waited until I was ready to start quilting the Stash Artists quilt.

Once that quilt was basted and ready for quilting, it was time to bring this quilt out, too. I started each quilting session with 10-20 minutes of this double-loop that I love quilting so much. I used Aurifil 2600 because it's works well with all the different colours in the fabrics.

After those 10-20 minutes, I switched thread and worked on the Stash Artists quilt for the rest of the time I had for quilting. The next day, I switched back to the 2600 thread and did the same thing. It didn't take many days like that to finish quilting the baby quilt! Why had I put it off for so long?

Since this quilt already has every possible colour in it, I dug into my box of scrap binding pieces and just pulled out all the longest pieces. I had way more than I needed, so I removed some of them, then sewed the rest together. Even after removing some of the strips from the pile, the ones I sewed together were still way more than I needed. Oh well, now there's a good long strip already pieced for the next scrap quilt binding.

This quilt looks so much better finished than it did when it was full of basting pins! The WIPS-B-GONE challenge worked its magic for another one of my projects that has been sitting around way too long.

We won't talk about the second Scrappy Triangles baby quilt that is still just a top...

That's my finish this week! What have you finished recently? Link it up below and be sure to visit some of the other links to celebrate their finishes 😊

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter