It's been a little while since I finished a quilt top.



This is the "Straits of Georgia" quilt top from the Fat Quarter Quilts book.

Here's a closeup:



This took me longer than it should have, but as it turns out, there's only one RIGHT way to sew all four of those pieces together, and there's at least one WRONG way. Which I kept doing. So I had to unpick.

And then, last week, as I was working, I realized that because fat quarters are very typically cut SMALLER than what the books assume they are (I suppose that's because the fabric companies make fabric narrower than the assumed 45" width), I wasn't going to be able to make the 8 blocks of each color.

And I got unhappy, because I thought that would mess up the cool diagonal setting I was planning, and I'd have to go instead to some kind of random setting. So I put the quilt in "time out" for a while. And then, I realized, I could still do the diagonal setting, it would just have to be a little shorter.

I'm happier with the quilt now that it's finished. I still don't think it's a "best ever" (I wound up having to do an awful lot of squaring up of blocks and there are a few irregularities), and the colors didn't work quite as well as I had hoped.

I also decided maybe it was time to take the snowmen down off my mantel (maybe now we'll stop getting wintry weather).



I wasn't sure what kind of theme to go with. First I thought of St. Patrick's Day, but once I put out the little cottage salt-and-pepper shakers and the glass with the etched triskele (you can't really see it in the photo but it was a "favor" at my cousin's very Irish-themed wedding), I realized I lacked much stuff that smacked of Ireland.

So I changed my mind and went with "favorite British children's book characters."

Well, it is *my* mantel, after all.

So here are some close-ups:



Doubtless you recognize these. They were all made from kits or from patterns (Tigger, Eeyore, and Piglet from kits; Pooh from a pattern).



These may not be as immediately recognizable but they are supposed to be Ratty, Mole, and Mr. Toad from Wind in the Willows. I made these up myself; kind of designed them as I went along. Mole is my favorite - you can't really see it in the photo but he wears a tiny pair of spectacles made of very fine wire. I'm not quite as satisfied with how Toad came out but it's hard to get an accurate portrayal of an amphibian.

This last character is probably the most difficult to recognize, both because he's not a particularly "true" portrayal based on the illustration in the book, and because he's an extremely minor character.



It's Bill the Lizard, from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I wrote about making him a long time ago, back here and here.

I re-made myself a Bill the Lizard partly out of nostalgia - as I said in one of those entries from 2004, I always felt a little sorry for poor Bill when I was a child, he seemed to get the dirty work, and then he got shot up the chimney for his trouble...

I guess designing non-mammals is harder for me; I'm not totally satisfied with either Mr. Toad or Bill.