Good Fortune - Part 2

It's the second week of Bonnie Hunter's Good Fortune mystery quilt.

This week we made blue and white half square triangles.

Blue is probably my favourite colour, so I had a lots of blues in my stash to chose from.

After seeing all that red dye last week, I decided to prewash the blues too.

I also had a number of low volume prints with hints of blue on them, so I've used up some of them too.

I prefer to make my half square triangles (HST) by cutting squares 1" bigger than the finished size of the block.  I then mark a diagonal line with a ruler, and sew 1/4" either side of it.  I cut down the line and then press the two halves open.  I use my Bloc loc ruler and my rotating cutting board to trim up my HSTs.

Bonnie suggested a couple of methods in her blog post for making HSTs, but I'm comfortable with the method I've been using for some years now.

I'm linking up with Bonnie Hunter's linky party here.  You can see everyone else's progress if you take a look at Bonnie's post on her Quiltville blog.

Picnic Quilt (previously known as BOM HST)

Last week I started hand quilting my Picnic Quilt.  I've decided to call it a Picnic Quilt because it reminds me of mum's quilt that we sat on at picnics when I was growing up in the 1970's.

Mum made most of our clothes, and many of the scraps were included in the picnic quilt. I remember sitting on that quilt and identifying all the fabrics I liked in the quilt.

It's grown bigger than this now

My quilt is made from Half Square Triangle blocks that I won at Capital Quilters Block of the Month last year.  So it contains scraps from lots of guild members. The blocks are 4.5" unfinished - 4" finished.

I didn't have to sew it up in this way, but I really liked the design so I just kept it that way.  However, sewing together blocks trimmed by other people can be a bit difficult, so I put in some borders to reset the alignment.

Not a great photo with the light shining through, but you get the idea.

I'm hand quilting straight lines on this one with Aurifil 12wt in red.  I like big stitch hand quilting so the stitches show and add character to the quilt.

  I'm also echo quilting in the opposite direction in grey so the coloured sections pop out (you can see that around the central motif).

I've been really good at keeping on task so far this year. This quilt is number 5 on my Quilting Priorities for 2018 list.  I've finished numbers 1 and 2, but 3 and 4 are still WIPs.