Soy Amado No. 62

It's March winds here so the chances of me giving you a half decent coastal quilt shot are fairly remote at the moment.

But you deserve more than my washing line.

So we ventured out to the relative shelter of the small nature reserve down the lane and came up with this for you.

I was reduced to quilt holding upping duties and The Photographer's Assistant took charge so the eye was not always on the correct ball.

And the back.

Now just as we were leaving, I spotted an island speciality: the so called Hedge Veg stall.

They're dotted all over the place and come in all shapes and sizes and are used to sell people's excess produce. Money is left in the honesty box and off you go.

Sadly. a small minority of people 'off you go' without paying or even taking the money box with them.

Which has resulted in some of the bigger Hedge Veg stalls having to install CCTV cameras and some of the smaller stalls closing altogether.

Hedge Veg stalls also used to be a good way for some of the larger commercial scale growers to sell some of the export products to the local market - we get our tomatoes this way each year. During the 1970s, Guernsey was exporting nine million trays of tomatoes a year.

However, the island has slowly been pushed out by cheaper markets and many of the once thriving greenhouses now look like this.

Hello camera shop, I paid you £25 to service my camera and remove that annoying piece of fluff in the sky

It has had to diversify and is now the largest producer of clematis in the world but is still littered with once thriving greenhouses, now falling into eery disrepair.

Anyway, I'm wandering off track, this is Soy Amado No. 62

Soy Amado No. 61

No. 61 is brown.

Like very brown.

I only bring it up because so many quilters seem to have an aversion to brown.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: brown is good. Brown is your passport to gently changing from one colour group to another, all the while retaining warmth and flow.

Black and white will stop your colour flow. It will make (imo) the quilt less warm.

That said, every colour has its place in a quilt.

Rather like the quilting going on in that animal print block

And that includes brown.

Soy Amado No. 60

We're on the washing line today as this part of the garden is walled in and therefore less windy and after the disaster that was the last post...

Well, enough said.

I'm not sure what I was doing with this one really.

Possibly primary colours.

Possibly not.

The thing is, once you get to number 60 and a year on, you realise it doesn't actually matter how you put the blocks together.

Each quilt is going to be individual, serve a worthwhile purpose and look fab.

And I'm more than happy with that.

Soy Amado No. 59

I had a one-legged quilt holder upper to help me with No. 59. It's quite a rarity to spot this endangered species in the wild these days.

Unfortunately, this is as good as it gets for No. 59.

Quite possibly the worst photos I have ever taken of a Soy Amado quilt.

So bad, I decided I'd give it another airing on the washing line to see if I could get better pictures.

But then I realised this and several other quilts have already been bundled up and started their long journey to Mexico City.

Which I'd like to think is the bigger and better picture anyway.

Soy Amado No. 58

Though I'd give you a coastal view for this one but the wind wasn't playing ball.

It's kind of a purple pink mash up of blocks.

And the back is equally impressively colourful.

But we got there in the end with the front.

Thank you once again to everyone who has sent blocks (I know most of these are from Canada - sorry about the long wait to see them made up into quilts) and thank you to those who continue to send them.

Private swapping

When I joined Instagram a year ago, it was primarily to reach more people to help me with my Soy Amado project.

As the weeks went by though, I did start looking at what other people were up to and there was one person in particular whose feed kept catching my eye. She is called imasavonasac  and I just love her use of colour and the original shapes she designs and sews together.

So back end of last year I asked her if she'd be interested in doing a private pillow/cushion swap and she said yes.

Fast forward to the last 10 days and we swapped. There may also have been chocolate involved and on my part at least, it is no longer around for documentary evidence.

I made this.

And received this in return.

We like pretty much the same kinds of fabrics and although I have most of them used in the cushion, I would never have put them together the way she did. I find it really different and creative and I love it.

I would definitely recommend this kind of craft swapping. If you admire someone's work, just go ahead and ask. I think it works better than taking part in a blind group swap where your partners are assigned for you. Sometimes I have struggled to fully 'get' what I think my partner would like and, I am sure, vice versa.

On this occasion, it was definitely a win-win.

Thank you Sami for a great swap.

Soy Amado No. 57

The sun is shining and spring could well be in the air.

No. 57 gave me problems.

I sewed a row no problem.

Then a sewed another row.

And then I realised the person who provided the blocks for the second row had made them 12" and not 12 1/2" which left me with two rows to sew together which were clearly not going to meet where they should.

I contemplated undoing the first row and scaling the blocks down to 12" but I couldn't face that so I'm afraid I resorted to brutally cutting off the excess either end and to be honest, the quilt is none the wiser for it.

And while I was huffing and puffing that conundrum and cutting all the other blocks in this quilt down to 12",  I inadvertently sewed two blocks with the same colour next to each other and then one completely back to front which offends my colour placement aesthetics but I have got over it.

And the back with the one random rogue front block.

Now usually I would take the quilt for an outing for you but Dog Walking Friend and I decided to go incognito without the quilt and instead here are some lovely spring pictures for you sans aforementioned quilt.

There's 26 more of these here and they're all different and rather nice too.