A bit of practice before playing with my parcel

Having won a prize draw, for the first time ever, I waited for my parcel to arrive from Seamstar

Little box, small enough to go through the letter box

How cute is that?

(It didn't really come with a pack of needles, I couldn't find a marker pen to blank out my address)

Opened the parcel, and all this amazing stuff was packed into the little box

And there was my cushion making kit.
Full contents are:-
6 charm squares
wadding and calico - for the lining
Linen - for the squares and the backing
invisible zip
piping
bias binding
instruction card

But...before I started I remembered that my cutting isn't that accurate.  So, first things first, new blade in the rotary cutter and some practising on cheap fabric.

Wow! Such a difference, and so much easier.

Ready to go!
One of the good things about modern machines, and I've no idea why this is, is that you can sew off the edge of the fabric. Not like my ancient Singer where you have to sew on fabric or risk breaking it forever.

Which means you can put the pieces together and feed them into the machine one after the other.  The end result is ...

A string of joined together squares which then get joined together to make something else.  The hard part is matching the corners. Of course, if you've cut accurately, and your seams are all the same, this isn't a problem.......but this is the real world, and even the best get it wrong occasionally ;/

The instructions say to sew in rows, but I think its easier to sew in blocks and then join strips to the block, it helps accuracy, especially for someone like me who's a bit haphazard (after all I only found out from watching the Sewing Bee that you should iron as you go along!)

Some fairly accurately cut squares and matched up corners.

Better than my later attempt at half square triangles. In my defence I normally hand stitch patchwork pieces if they're small, and have never really worked out accurate 1/4 inch seams on my sewing machine. For squares, it doesn't really matter, so long as all the seams are the same, but a fraction out on triangles makes all the difference.

At least it was some cheap fabric purchased from EBay for precisely this purpose.

More practice required.