Finally!

At, long, long last the sun has decided to shine on my little corner of the world.  Finally, the grey clouds are gone and are replaced with glorious fluffy white ones.

It's been a shock to the system after all this while, but a wonderful, welcome shock and we've been enjoying it.  Little One went on a weekend day trip to the seaside with Nannie and Granddad and I got some sunny, joyful, outdoor hooky time.

I'll have to tell you about what's going on in that basket another time though, because I have so many other things still to share with you.  My productivity levels must have gone into overdrive or something because I can barely post fast enough to show you everything I've done and I don't want to totally overload you all.

Today, I want to show you some fabricy goodness...

...in the form of some flowery coasters.  Some trial and error involved in these little coasters mind you, but it's all good learning experience I suppose.  I had the idea to make some mini dresden plates and use them as coasters because I'd been seeing lovely dresdens everywhere and 'monkey see, monkey wanna do'!

I happened across a petal ruler while wandering around a quilt shop, so that seemed the perfect place to start.  Lovely fabrics selected and triangles cut, I was ready to go.

I love this bit so much, the sewing and pressing bit.  Nice neat lines, nice crisp pressed folds - heaven!

Soon I had some little circles waiting to be made into flowers.

I made my own flower shape as the curve on the ruler for this size didn't look at all right, so I pinned my batting and backing fabric and sewed again.

This time though...

...disaster.

What a mess.  I snipped around my curves and everything but with the batting, the curves were just to tiny and tight to work and ended up looking too pointed looking.  Now, a better sewer than me would not doubt know how to solve these problems (and if you do and want to leave a comment - please do.) but I confess, I was stumped.

Stumped, but not to be defeated.  Even those messy looking first tries showed me how cute these could look if I could only get them right, so I cam up with a radical and probably slightly nutty plan.

I decided to hand piece the triangles, complete with the curve I wanted so that the shape looked right.  So I cut out some little, individual petal templates.  Then I used this flower shape as a template for the batting and backing and carefully sewed the two halves together.

I haven't got any pictures of this rather convolved process I'm afraid but I'm very pleased to report that it did work.

 Much better flowery shapes, don't you agree?  I'm very pleased I didn't give up on them.  I love them now.

I also did a little hand quilting on it, just for a finishing touch.

They're for my living room and they are doing a very good job of adding a little flowery brightness and happiness to the place.

And, just so I didn't waste all my other bits of fabric, I made the disasters into plain ol' circles.  Not as good as flowers, but they'll do as an extra couple of back ups.  (They can be for my less favoured visitors.)

So if you ever do come and see me now, for tea and a chat, you'll know that you're also being ranked.  Who is worthy of a flower coaster, that's the question?

S x