I’ve been quietly working away on my Splendid Sampler Quilt this week, I’ve stitched 36 blocks now, so I’m over a third of  the way through this project!

Last week I was stitching lots of tiny hexagons, like 42 of them…well actually I found I’d stitched 48 by accident, so I’m half hoping another block requires tiny hexagons, then I’ll be well ahead! This week I picked out all the paper templates from the back of each hexagon and appliqued the design to the background square.

Block 35 was released in the middle of June. It’s called ‘The Wishful Garden’ and was designed by Kristyne Czepuryk. I pieced it a couple of weeks ago as the basic block is pretty straight forward, but it took until this week to have the time to sit and embroider the strips. I learnt one new stitch, creatan stitch, I had to get my book out for that one. The other stitches are feather, fly, herringbone, lazy daisy and french knots. I think if I was stitching it again I’d be tempted to either use a variegated thread throughout, or use a darker green than the one I chose.

The Vintage Flower basket block was released last week, they had dropped hints that ric-rac was involved, so when I was in London, I picked up a couple of lengths in mauve and green. Well I don’t know what happened to them but I haven’t seen them since! It’s worked out for the best in the end as when I was selecting my fabrics I chose a pale blue pattern for the basket. I popped into Samuel Taylors on Thursday and spotted a pale blue checked ric-rac. OK so it was twice the price of plain ric-rac, but I only needed 50p’s worth and it coordinates perfectly.

I appliqued the design with bondaweb and blanket-stitched round, it’s quite solid in places as sometimes there were four layers to stitch through. I’m really pleased with the flowers as I managed to fussycut so there’s a circle in the centre of each flower, I also did a couple of extra back-stitches to separate each petal. I added a couple of extra flowers using the fabric with tiny flowers on, I like the extra green background that it adds.

I’ve made 36 blocks so far, I’m four behind at the moment, only one of which looks complicated, so I’m cool about that.

I’m linking up with Kathy’s Quilts for Slow Stitching Sunday and Super Mom No Cape for Vintage Embroidery Monday, why not have a look at the hand sewing everyone else has been busy with.