Better late than never

I know, I know, I skipped TWO weeks of blogging. Shame on me, right? Did you even miss me? I'm sure you did. I missed you all!

Lots of things happened while I was playing hooky. My daughter bought me some flowers and my daffodils started blooming at the same time. I added a bunch of daffys to her bouquet. Oh my, those yellow flowers smelled SO much like spring.

 Back in the studio I am still plugging away at the Nordic Fire quilt. 

I also started working on another challenge for our quilt guild. This one is going to be called "Pickled Herring".  I named it that because it has a herring bone type of piecing.  It is sitting on my new wool pressing mat.

I made my pressing mat from scratch. I bought this Norwegian wool yarn at a thrift store a few years ago. It wasn't in the best of condition and it was very scratchy. I decided to crochet it into a new wool ironing mat.

Here it is before I washed it

It measured 37" long

It was almost 17" wide

The first time I washed and dried it, I got this much lint from it

 I washed it a second time and it had shrunk five whole inches!

It had shrunk 3" on the width

The process of washing and drying wool is called felting. Using a wool mat for pressing makes pressing quilt blocks a breeze. The wool acts almost like an iron on the underside of whatever you're pressing.  You don't need to use steam either. You can buy pre-made mats too. I have also bought 100% wool sweaters from thrift stores and felted them to use for pressing mats and pincushions. Pins and needles like wool.

Dexter is telling me to get going to the next topic

Here are the things that were on my design wall last weekend. 

The blocks on the right are part of the Nordic Fire quilt.

A week later I was auditioning fabrics for around those blocks. I didn't have enough of the fabric that the pattern called for, to use where needed.

I decided to improvise and used the red on both sides of the blocks. I like how this turned out.

Dexter says, "Are you done yet?"

I am not done yet Dexter. I am working on "Pickled Herring". Here are two panels of strips that are sewn in a herring bone pattern for this project:

Roxy says, "It's time to go outside and play. Are you done yet?"

Yes Roxy, I am done for today. 

Till next time, happy sewing y'all!