March update - quite a month...

Hello everyone,

Well, when I last posted I doubt we could have predicted just what the past four weeks have brought to many places in the world.  

My younger son had just come back from a month walking in New Zealand, the farthest place he has ever visited and a great adventure; he then started work for the first time, and suddenly all plans for the foreseeable are on hold....

I was ill two weeks ago, I am assuming with Covid-19 though cannot be absolutely sure at this stage. I am now well and back to sewing, but staying at home, like everyone else.  Sewing is a great pleasure and good resource when everything else in life shuts down, and I hope you too are managing to find solace and pass the time with needle and thread.

So here are some of the various WIPs I managed to progress in February, and the part of March when I have been able to sew.  Many of the WIPs were well advanced and did not need all that much work to complete them, so I have not turned into sewing superwoman in recent weeks.

First is a finished baby quilt: the block is known as Waterwheel, and I made a bigger version many years ago.  This time I wanted to see if I could make it from Charm squares so I made the block smaller, 6 inches finished, strips cut at 1 1/2 inches.  You need two identical Charm packs and some background fabric to make this little quilt.  I used Later Alligator by Sandy Gervais for Moda which is bright and cheerful.

Here is a picture of the back: the block looks more complicated than it actually is to make, but I love how the pressing works to help everything fit together neatly.  You will see I have done my favourite trick of spinning the seam allowances in the centre of the blocks for flat middles.  This really helps when you come to do the quilting.

On the back I put a Riley Blake multi spot in flannel: the fabric pulls together all the colours on the front and is cosy too!  The quilt measures 39 inches square.  Thirty six blocks set 6 x 6 with a 2 1/2 inch plain border to float the blocks.  Bound in a red Linea print from stash.

Regarding the quilting, this is one of the fun parts.  I am not the world's greatest machine quilter, as I have mentioned in the past, but this design is straightforward to do with a walking foot.  A smallish quilt like this is easy to turn under the machine, and there are shortcuts which help to minimise the number of turns and ends to tie in.

Definitely worth having a go as the quilting really enhances the positive and negative spaces within the design.

The other finish is a top which I put together and layered a couple of years ago.  It is a bigger version of the Oakshott Little Boxes which I made here.  I am ashamed really that I did not finish it off ages ago, as the quilting didn't take all that long in the end (I just got distracted by other projects, the story of my life...).  But I am pleased it is now done and I can enjoy the finished product.

I loved working with the Oakshott fabrics and some stripes which may or may not have been an old Oakshott line.  Stripes are ideal for showing off partial seaming (Tutorial in the post already referred to if you fancy having a go).

I was very organised and cut my pieces in advance so it was a real pleasure to sit at the sewing machine and select the colours for each block as I went along - chain piecing, of course!

Here are a few of the finished blocks which measure 5 inches finished.  I tried to pair the fabrics so the solid colour related to one of the colours in the stripe, whether to co-ordinate or to contrast: great fun. 

I kept the quilting quite simple this time (more complex in the smaller, first quilt) as I didn't want to distract from the linear, boxy design.  I used a variegated Guterman thread which I had to hand.

The quilt measures approximately 58" x 78".  There are 165 blocks, set 11 x 15.

  

 You can see that I used up a lot of my surplus fabrics on the back (14 inch squares), and bound the quilt in a shot cotton I had to hand in sufficient quantity.  It is a fairly neutral colour so hopefully doesn't distract from the colours in the quilt.

I have also quilted two other tops recently but haven't quite finished stitching down the binding so will not show you photos just yet.  My main achievement before getting ill was to send off a quilt for a magazine, and again that one will have to wait.  Amazing what a real deadline makes you do!

Anyway that's enough from me for now.  I hope you stay safe and well in these difficult weeks when we all have to adjust to a new way of being, for the time being at least.  I hope you will enjoy some peaceful sewing time as a distraction from your worries.

January over - but some progress!

Hi all,

How has your January been?  Amazingly I have managed to catch up with quite a few things on the home admin side but also, and more importantly, I have made time to sew!

Last year I was a bit down in the dumps about how much fabric I had/how many WIPs had accumulated/how many ideas for quilts were unrealised and how I seemingly had no time to advance any, let alone all, of these matters.

So my goal for January was to tackle some of the WIPs which have been kicking about for one or several years, cluttering up my house and my brain.

Very happy to report that my goal has been achieved and I have got three quilt tops together.  I am sure they will now lie fallow till I get organised for a marathon quilting session, but at least the tops are together and I can liberate and use the leftovers in other projects. 

Which is a sort of tidying up, mentally as well as in the context of piles of stuff everywhere in physical space (aka lack of space).

So here they are in order of completing:

Carnival: the pieces for this quilt were cut out probably three years ago and I got as far as joining the elongated triangles into pairs but no further.  Ever indecisive, I had the 'pennants' up on a design board for ages, finally taking them down and putting them away when the room had to be decorated.  My motivation in tackling this one first is that I wanted to use any spare scraps for my Log Cabin squares (I said they were addictive to make!).

I guess over the intervening time I have become more relaxed about trying different colour combinations and not always playing safe, as this time around it didn't take nearly so long to lay out the pieces in an arrangement I was fairly happy with; I then got on with sewing it all together before I could change my mind.

I won't say I am any more skilful or instinctively good with colour as I don't feel skilled/clever at all in this area, but I do think that practice has helped, and making the Log Cabin squares has been a good exercise.

Anyway for better or worse I now have a completed top.  It measures 56" x 75" and the pattern is a free one available from Windham Fabrics.   The design is by Ashley Newcomb of the blog Film in the Fridge.  I love quite a few of her quilt designs and am currently using a free tutorial on her website for another quilt - but you will have to wait till February to see that one!

Meanwhile I am very happy with Carnival which makes me feel cheerful.  All the fabrics were from stash, including the plains.  Now I just have to decide how to quilt it...

Next up is a Fractured Star design.  I started this quilt in January 2019 in a workshop at Patchwork Cabin, a shop local to me which has since closed.  I loved making the blocks and made as many as I could on the day and in the week afterwards, then ground to a halt as I was overtaken by my older son's move to Belgium and then the village fete planning which I mentioned in a previous post.

I knew I wanted to make the quilt bigger than 25 blocks, and because the design has to be square, that meant making it a 7 x 7 block set: another 24 blocks were required!  I used mostly fabric from my stash and really enjoyed working out the layout with the different shades of blue.

I also decided that I didn't want the corner triangles to form a dense blue hourglass square where the blocks touch, so I modified the pattern and added more narrow sashing and tiny cornerstones to keep the whole quilt light and airy.

Here's a photo pf the back so you can see all the 1/4" seam allowances press neatly into the back of the 1/2" finished sashing.  The slight extra thickness in the sashing actually helps to frame the star blocks.  

Adding the sashing between the blocks also saved me from having to match the horizontal and vertical sashing/seam lines within the star blocks and avoided the lumps and bumps which would have occurred where all those seams would have come together.

Very happy with this one too, but it is large at 88"square: the blocks finish at 12".  The sashing between the blue star pieces of the block and between the blocks is cut 1" wide, so it and the cornerstones finish at 1/2".  The colours and shapes make me think of cool wintry snowflakes.  Looking forward to quilting this one with simple straight lines through the sashing once I find a suitable backing fabric.

Final finished top was a bonus; I picked out the fabric strips one evening last autumn with a new baby in mind.  The pattern is from Cluck Cluck Sew (Strip and Flip Baby Quilt, which is a free tutorial) and it is one which I have thought about and wanted to make for ages.  The strips sat there without any further action, and the baby duly arrived and received a different quilt...  But I finally managed to put the top together in a couple of evenings this month.

Fun to try for a rainbow effect, though my palette is more limited than the full spectrum of colour (determined by a jelly roll selection of strips I had on hand).  You do need strips the full width of fabric so fat quarters are no good for this project.  I am still pondering how to quilt it but no more babies in my vicinity are expected just yet, so I have a breathing space!

Spotty fabric for backing, by Riley Blake I think.  Quilt top measures 38" x 42" so I can just about squeeze it on to a 1 metre piece of backing fabric.

My other great achievement this January (having failed last year) was to make some marmalade.  I do love the zing of marmalade on sourdough toast for breakfast - jam just doesn't cut through and wake me up!

Have a great weekend, and here's to a productive February!

Project roundup

Working on lots of bits and pieces this past couple of weeks.  Never seemed the right time to blog; husband hogging the computer or I didn't have the right photo and the light was dreadful.  We are still quite grey and chilly here, with only the occasional stunning blue and sunny day interspersed.  But Spring has been sighted, and the mornings and evenings are not so dark when I take my daughter to/pick her up from the train station.



I managed a small finish, having put together a baby quilt from squares left over from this quilt top, pieced in May 2011, nearly its third fourth anniversary, and still waiting to be quilted.

Would you believe I've just seen the same quilt design/block made by Lee of Freshly Pieced which she blogged about yesterday - that's happenstance!





It's the classic Jewel Box block and Lee has a tutorial or you can look at the pattern I used which was a free one from Moda Bakeshop called Sunkissed Jewel Box by Mary Lane Brown (here).


The fabrics I used were Verna and Hunky Dory from Moda and Lizzie by Anna Griffin, plus an assortment of neutral just-off-whites.  I like mixing collections for a speedy quilt which isn't too predictable.










I love being able to make something from 'nothing' and the little squares had been sitting around in a bag for far too long.

I was inspired by the huge Checkerboard quilt in Sunday Morning Quilts and quilted  it just like Amanda Jean, to one side of the seam lines in two directions.  Just enough quilting as the squares are 2 1/4" unfinished, 1 3/4" finished.

You may just be able to see the large pink spot on the back - not quite long enough so I pieced in a strip of plain white.  Stripy binding from stash - it was by Heather Bailey from an old collection. Quilt measures 28 1/2" x 44 1/2".

I also quilted the fresh and fruity Not-quite Bargello top from here - I stopped because I was waiting for the border fabric and then was waylaid by other projects.  I haven't had a chance to sit and hand sew the binding - I like to save this sort of job for when I am not able to use my sewing machine - maybe a finish by the end of the week.  I don't have a photo so that will have to wait till next time.

Plugging on with my EPP Lozenge quilt.  At the last minute I decided I needed the quilt to be slightly longer than it is wide so had to make a few more lozenges.  It is almost square - but I couldn't bear it being wider than it was tall, it just didn't feel right.  Again, I will save the reveal on this one till I have squared off the top.

What I will claim as my WIP for the link up today is that I have finished hand piecing all 16 of the Rose Chain blocks which I started back on last November.  I am ready to join the blocks and then tackle the applique borders, so it's not going to be really finished for a while yet.  However it is satisfying to have got this far after a 10-year lay off....

Now for confession: today I went shopping for a white cotton wadding, full of resolve to quilt the Jewel Box quilt top mentioned above, having dug it out of the cupboard, and equal resolve not to buy any fabric, having been inspired by Crazy Mom Quilts' 6 month fabric fast.  I can do that, I thought...

Maybe not.

I don't feel too bad though as I didn't buy any fabric when I wasn't well - hah!- and didn't go to the sale at Farnham Maltings or the Ardingly Quilt Show in January, so this was my first splurge in a while.  I LOVE what I bought, the 'plains' are Peppered Cottons and have a real depth of colour, and the spots are so subtle I couldn't pass them by.

The musical instrument fabric is by Fabric Freedom (no name on the selvage, I'm afraid) and I couldn't resist: my younger son plays bass trombone in a brass ensemble so I have to make him something with this!

Linking to Lee at Freshly Pieced today - always great to see what she is up to, and all the other link ups.  There's so much making going on out there - what are you busy with?