Anyway, got going on the Lemur pattern in a somewhat disorganized way cutting the pieces as I was needing them. Definitely underestimated how small those required pieces were (i.e. 1in). Never mind, I had the time and got started on the face...this took me most of yesterday...in between doubting whether I would get this together. However, I took it fairly slow and just worked my way through the diagrams. Elizabeth' patterns are very well put together with lots of diagrams. In fact, I skipped most of the writing (there are 3 different options in terms of sizes which I always find a bit confusing) and just concentrated on the page with the measurements for the pieces and the individual diagrams.
Here is the face emerging
This was actually quite challenging and I was struggling...the face comes together in 3 parts and is tiny. This section comes to 5in and the seams are all ironed open which I am not used to at all. When I photographed the face I realised that one of the eyes was a tad smaller than the other...will have to watch out for that for the next one. This could have possibly happened because I was swapping between two rulers. Need to stop doing that!
Must say, I am not a fan of making 1in flipped over half square traingles! As I went along though I started using a fabric glue stick and lightly glued the 1in square in place before sewing on the diagonal. That worked really well and the flipped over units were on average a bit better than before.
After this it got a bit easier (completed the rest of the lemur today) although still could not get away from those 1in pieces. They were everywhere...
Found some matching fabric to make the ears pop a bit and trimmed away some irregularities to make it all fit. Overall, I found that measuring the completed units as you go and straightening them did the trick (mostly!).
Then came the body which was nice and easy
The tail section looked easy enough, however I am a bit sloppy in my 1/4in seam allowance and as a rule always stitch this a bit narrower...as I was going along, I started to get a bit concerned as to whether this would all fit together (made a few mistakes when I did the fox quilt in terms of trimming some completed fox blocks and inadvertently cutting into the 1/4in seam allowance, hence cutting off some points). Sewed the rest of the tail extremely carefully and did a little bit of fudging to meet the seams and wow...it came out beautifully
Not too bad for a first attempt! Absolutely love the look of this lemur. I will make another one for the small baby quilt option of the pattern. The rest of the quilt will just be the beige background fabric which will allow me to fill it up with some cool FMQ once the new machine arrives.
Had a look at the Koala Bears pattern...also has a fair few 1in squares in there 😬 Maybe I will get used to them!
It came out so good! It does look difficult. Too many small pieces!
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