Category Archives: Quilting

Back to Quilting (and the blog)

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This blog has been sorely neglected. Life has been busy.  You know the drill.  But suddenly life is more uncertain and I’m spending a lot of time at home!

This quilt has been around for  long time.  It’s recipient is now three.   I started making it before he was born.  Oops.

I am however delighted with the way it has turned out. Yes, my free motion quilting is decidedly dodgy in places (if the folks at Bernina ever read this I would ❤️ to try a machine with the Bernina Stitch Regulator…) but don’t the colours just zing.

Pattern is Kindred Pinwheelsfrom Missouri Star Quilt Company if you follow the link it is a great example of how fabric choices can influence quilt appearance.   The version they made was all pastel nice-ness whereas my version is kickass primary colours!

It’s made from Kona solid colours – for those who haven’t met Kona there is a huge range of colours available to play with and I always have great fun picking which ones to use.  I have a colour chart at home but playing with actual fabric cannot be beaten – in non lockdown days I visit The Village Haberdashery in West Hampstead who stock the whole range.

The colours I used (in case you fancy replicating the zing) were Silver,  Poppy, Orange,  Sunny, Kale,  Breakers,  Bright Periwinkle and Dark Violet.

 

I made a dress!

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Inspired by the GBSB I decided to veer away from work sewing and quilting and try my hand at dressmaking.

Stuff for little people is much more fun to make as well as being quicker and cheaper. One of my regular fabric haunts (Plush Addict) had a competition to win a pattern and the fabric to make it up with. I didn’t win but ventured along to the Compagnie M website and fell in love with several of their cute items especially the Lotta dress.

I bought and assembled the pattern, identified stash fabric and a recipient and got sewing!  It was fun. The instructions weren’t always clear. I discovered how cool the automatic button hole feature in my sewing machine is and made one major cock up which was attaching the bodice inside out but otherwise it was uneventful and I am delighted with the result, I don’t know if it fits yet, but don’t knock my bubble! 

   

       

An overdue project

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I have been using an old pair of shoes to prop open my bedroom door (essential to allow daylight into the dark and dingy hallway) since I moved into this flat.

In October 2014 I bought 



cheap rice to fill a doorstop.  I have finally got around to making the doorstop today! I used an online pattern.  It was a quick and easy sew using up some of my lovely Mormor fabric stash. 

My only complaint is that it is a bit smaller than I anticipated – only about 11cm high.  Next time I think I would scale the printing to make it a bit more substantial – all the better to hold a door open with!

Choices choices

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I’ve finished my latest quilt top after declaring last weekend a stress busting sewing weekend.
It is a modabakeshop pattern from their flashback Friday series called windy days. It was nice and easy to out together and I’m really pleased that the pinwheels a re markedly better than those on my first ever quilt!
Now I’m swithering about colours for the binding and background. It is Christmas fabric but not overtly so. I’m contemplating mirroring the bright green or bright blue? It is destined for a home with small children so I fear grey may be too pale!

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My quilt is famous!

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Or so it seems.

I sent my big rainbow quilt off to the lovely Kay Bell (who trades as borderlinequilter) and she has blogged about it on her lovely blog.

I am delighted with her quilting and massively chuffed to see my work on her site.

Today I sewed a rainbow

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This quilt really started 2 years ago when I went to the lovely but crazily mad wedding celebration for two of my friends. They were moving abroad and didn’t want gifts. I always Thoth I would craft them something but didn’t really decide what.

Fast forward two years – I’ve stared quilting, they are on their way back from he sunny antipodes to cold old Scotland and I chanced upon a very sunny jelly roll pack of batik fabric in a quilt shop. The rainbow quilt was conceived.

It is a very simple stacked coin design with white sashing and I’m just putting the finishing touches to the pieced back before I send it off to be quilted – it is much too big to do myself.

If you want to replicate this it was fairly straightforward. I stitched 17 jelly roll strips together to form a square (I could have stitched all 34 together but it was starting to get unwieldy). My strips irritatingly were not a uniform length so I had to be careful not to a stretch them.

I then chopped the strip fabric into 7″ wide columns. I got 12 in total. I then stitched the columns together to make a continuous loop of fabric.

Deciding where to unpick to form each column for the quilt was fun but slightly daunting.

Once I had 6 columns made up of 34 coins I joined the white sashing. Each strip is 5.5″ wide (so the visible width is 5″ once the top was assembled).

The borders were cut to 12″.

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Quilt 3

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An unusual weekend with no work and no social commitments beckoned. So I whipped out my sewing machine, some of the fabric I’ve been collecting and perused the Moda Bake Shop website and settled on a design for another baby quilt. The one I used is called Story book star. It was a simple design to make and in less than 6 hours (remember I’m still learning how to do this) with only a little bit of ripping I had a quilt top.

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The came the fun bit choosing the backing fabric and binding. After my last disastrous attempt at making bias binding (the non bias bias binding affair) I opted to have a second attempt in order to perfect the skill.

My backing, batting and binding fabric have now arrived. I just need to find the time to use them. Maybe next weekend…