sewing mojo

...or the lack thereof, is what has been troubling me for some time.
Luckily, our great Stitch Tease Bee is keeping me sewing (I even have the idea for my month practically worked out). But other than that, it's been a bit of a struggle.
So my next quilt (after I make the scrappy one I'm still trying to choose the best design for) is going to be this:

 or possibly this:

before the year is over

There is still a few hours of 2015 left (well, about 15, if you live in my time zone), so I'd better show you my last quilt of this year.
I'm hoping to write a bit more about the process, as again I started with a very different idea for this quilt, but lets leave it for another time. For now, let me present... orange pickle:

pieced with my most treasured fabrics,

backed with my favourite Ikea print and with the obligatory pieced strip ;)

and if you look very, very closely you can even see that it's hand quilted.

So, hopefully, see you here some time next year for all the fun facts about the quilt (e.g. the top is pieced with 432 petal shapes and 864 "half-frame" shapes ;)) and in the meantime:

Happy New Year!

summer quilt

Finished at the beginning of summer, gifted at the end of summer, the summer quilt is finally with its intended recipient and I've even been able to hand it to him (well, maybe not so much hand as show, but he did grab a corner for a moment), so now I can show it to you, too.
Here's the front:

and the back full of dots:

and a bit of quilting in progress, because it was such a beautiful sunny day and it looked like I might have managed to mix summer and sun and joy into the quilt:

But the best shot, I think you'll agree, is the one I didn't take but received with permission to show you all:

it's that time again...

...time to air a bit this dusty blog of mine, encourage the spiders to weave their webs somewhere else, vacuum the rug (uh, wait, that last one might be about my flat rather than the blog) and show you what I've been up to.

And the answer is not much, but still there are two finished quilts to share.

First, the bigger one.

I actually finished it some time in May, but I didn't want to show it here before the intended owner saw it. Now that he's taken it home, you can see it too:

and the back:

I quilted pebbles on the blue border and wavy lines on the blocks and although I'd been initially a bit hesitant about the effect of this kind of quilting in white thread on dark background, I have to say I like the end result.

And, what's always the most important for me, the recipient seems to like the quilt.

As for the second quilt, it's still waiting to be gifted, but I hope I'll be forgiven for posting this sneak peek: