Easy Street–finally done!

I didn’t mean to have such a long blogging break, but things get in the way.  There’s a lot happening here behind the scenes in Silly Goose country.

I did manage to finish Easy Street finally.  Out of ten, it’s not a ten for me, but it’s a seven or eight.  The colours are not my ‘go-to’ colours, and that’s a good thing, I think.  I’ve totally used up all the pink, purple and green hand dyed fabrics in my stash, so that’s a good thing to.

I don’t know if I’ll do another mystery for a while.  Famous last words, I’m sure.  Remind me of this post when I do start another one.

I hope everyone is doing fine, with the various extremes of weather.  We’ve officially run out of rain water (our tanks are dry) so rain would be very welcome here in my little part of town.  But I do sympathise very much with those forced to move because of fires, or floods.  And those of you overseas, as I swelter with forty degree days, I hope the snow is not getting you down too much.

Tomorrow, I hope to post some more pictures.  I’m going to a class.  But we’ll see.  No rash promises.

See you soon!

Suzie

Catching Up

Whew.

One kid is at kindy, one kid is at school, one husband is back at work.  The house is quiet.  After seven weeks of school holidays, and all the chaos that is the Christmas season, I’m finally getting some time to myself.

Not that it’s been filled with sewing of any note, it’s been digging through the various levels of school holiday fun that remain on the floors of every room I seem to walk in.  But I have managed to do a little of my Easy Street.

These are older photos.  I seemed to be keeping up with everyone, and then I dropped my bundle and didn’t do any for ages.

I just looked at this photo and saw the glaring error.  Thankfully this is one of the older photos, and I’d only lay it there for design purposes, no stitching was involved.  I’ve rearranged it now.  Amazing how what you can’t see face to face sticks out glaringly in a photo.

The four corner pieces.  They are at least sewn together.

Got another one of those pesky four patches turned the wrong way.  Glad I hadn’t sewn those ones.

So after a few weeks of nothing much being achieved, I dug it all out the other day and the first thing I had to do was sort out what bit belonged to what block.  I’m not rash enough to actually label things BEFORE they go in the box, why would I do that???

It didn’t take too long and I managed to get a little bit done yesterday.

Block One.

Block Two

Now, a couple together with the border blocks.

And a couple more.  I’m pleased with it, I think the green will be toned down once I get more white in it. 

It’s a very – what’s the word I’m looking for?  Time consuming is obvious, even though Bonnie said it would be easy I struggled a little.  Getting all those four patches going the right way is pretty stressful, I’m checking everything two or three times before moving on to the next step because I just know I’ll sew the silly thing together and find something out of place.

But I’m happy with it.  It’s sure not my colours, which I’m pleased about because I need to step out of my comfort zone.  It’s way greener than I would have designed myself, but again – all okay. 

We’ll see how much of it I can get done by the end of the week.  Who knows, I might get it all together and cross another quilt off the UFO list.

Till tomorrow,

Suzie

Easy Street–A dead end

I wonder how many others out there have made their own Easy Street related puns.

I have come to a grinding halt with this one – I’ve had all sorts of issues with fabric choices, and running out of fabric, and placement problems.  I’ve probably come to the decision (though I don’t want to admit it) that Christmas/New Years is a really bad time for me to start a Bonnie Hunter mystery.

I’ve done a fair bit though, most of my individual units are made, and now I’m just in the process of assembling my blocks. 

Oh there’s an error in one of my placements.  I haven’t sewn these blocks together, just laid them on the display wall.

I started off just being scrappy, then quickly decided there wasn’t enough fabric to go around, so I ended up using mostly hand dyed. 

I’ve decided to reserve judgement on how I actually like the quilt – there seems to be an awful lot of green and I’m not really a green person.  But we’ll see. 

The top picture is my corner points, I can safely call them finished.  The middle picture is me playing around to make sure that I actually like the blocks together.  I think I’ll certainly be striking, and I can’t really be sure what the end result will look like, as the white of the design board washes out the whole effect of the blocks.  But I’m crossing my fingers that it’ll look okay when it’s done.  Definitely no borders on this one, I had to be really inventive with fabric as it is.  There is NONE left over.

Did you do an Easy Street?  Were you happy with yours?

Easy Street Step One

Yeah, I know.  I don’t need to do another quilt.  But I really do enjoy Bonnie Hunter’s mysteries and she promises there will be no more string blocks, so I’m giving it a go.  I reckon I’ve just made the deadline for the Mr Linky thing on her blog by about ten minutes, so Yay Me.

I decided that I would go with what Bonnie was doing hers out of, if only to push me into a whole different colourway.  I tend to stick to one or two variations on the same theme, which makes me lazy.  By choosing to use what she uses, I have to force myself to just ‘go with it’, and perhaps end up with a quilt I really love, rather than another ‘meh’ one.

So, she’s used grey, white, purple and lime.  I don’t have even the slightest grey in my colours, but I do have 2024935656 strips of black homespun.  So that’s what I used.  And creams/whites from the ever diminishing box of neutrals. 

Hopefully I’ll be able to keep up with this one.  I’ve got nothing else to do (cough).

Till tomorrow,

Suzie