Around the House 5 - HST quilt

I've never named my quilts, but this one probably does deserve a slightly better title than "HST quilt".  It could be "my favourite quilt ever", or "I just love this quilt", because I do.  Before I made this quilt I had used half-square triangles not very successfully on a couple of cushions, but for this quilt I took my time, trimmed all the squares, and was over the moon with how it came out.

I bought the fabric in this quilt just because I loved it.  I had kept popping in and out of the shop over a couple of weeks, trying to justify to myself why I could buy it or what I could make with it.  In the end, I just bought half a metre of each of the patterned fabrics and then started to muse on quilt designs.

The finished quilt looks absolutely nothing like my first idea.

My first idea was to make a sort of pixellated explosion starting in a bottom corner of the quilt, and moving diagonally across it.  I don't think I've explained it very well and I'm not sure I can describe it better - I will just have to actually make that design at some point and show you!

However, on musing over the fabric, I started to feel that half-square triangles were the way to go.  I bought some of my favourite patterned white background fabric - you can just about see the swirly flower pattern in the picture below (I absolutely adore this fabric, but the price prohibits me using it in more quilts), and started making the blocks.  I cut 6.5" squares to start with, and the finished blocks are 5.5".  I like to cut my squares a bit bigger than necessary for these so that if my seam allowances are slightly dodgy I can still trim them nicely to the right size.  Once I'd made a good pile, I began playing with a layout on the floor, and finally settled on this diamond pattern.

When it was finished, I hand quilted it about a centimetre on each side of each seam.  It took ages, but I was off work waiting for my baby to arrive, so had nothing else to do but whale around the house, watch daytime TV and handstitch this quilt.  I do really enjoy hand quilting - there is something very therapeutic about taking so much time over something.  You can't rush it, you just have to be there, and really enjoy the process.  It's quite an antidote to machine quilting where I sometimes feel under pressure to get it finished as soon as possible.

I backed it in a dark blue fabric spliced with a strip of the flea market fancy pink spots.  Because of the off-white thread I used for quilting, you can see the quilting design really clearly on the back which I love.

I bound it in some more of the pink spotty fabric - it's quite a wide binding, done at the time because I didn't know how to do a nice narrow binding, but actually I think the small white border and wide binding really frame the quilt nicely.

This is definitely one of my favourite curling up in front of the TV quilts, it makes me smile every time I look at it!

WIP - Black and White Cushions!

I'm excited, this is my very first commissioned project.

My husband's colleague wants some black and white cushions for her lounge.  It's a fun one because black and white isn't a colour scheme that I'd ever have chosen for myself, so it really is something a bit different to play with.  Cushions are fun anyway, because they are finished so quickly in comparison to quilts, and are a great chance to try out new designs before embarking on a whole quilt.

Taking a leaf from my Wren and Friends cushions, I bought a charm pack in Shades of Black and White by Moda and a metre of moda bleached white fabric, and started planning.  I'm aiming to do three cushions, and got the pieces cut out at lunch time today.

And as the clothes ironing got done yesterday, sewing can start tonight!

Linking up to WIP Wednesday at Freshly Pieced.

Around the House 2 - Butterflies

When you see a fabric that you absolutely adore, but it won't do for clothes and you can't stand to cut it up small for patchwork?  Heirloom chenille blanket from Anneliese over at Aesthetic nest to the rescue.  This lap/baby sized quilt lets you showcase over a metre of fabulous fabric, seeing the full effect of the design.  The piece of fabric I used for this quilt was 1.25m x width of fabric (44 inch fabric), so the finished quilt is just a bit smaller than that.

I have made two of these now, and this was the first one that I made.  I love this butterfly fabric, it's so happy, and it makes me smile every time I see it.

The tutorial for this blanket is really good.  I did invest in the proper chenille cutter in order to cut the back - although possible to do it with scissors I think it would take a huge amount of time, and be difficult to get the cuts looking even.  

This blanket lives on our sofa in the lounge, and is lovely to snuggle up with in an evening.  Doing the quilting on it does take a while - the lines are about half an inch apart - and it uses up a lot of thread, but it is so worth it.  One nice thing about the quilting though is that you don't need to worry if your lines of stitching seem to pull against each other (so the fabric goes wrinkly between the stitching lines).  When you cut the back all of the tension in the fabric is released and your wrinkles will vanish :)  

Also, there is no need to panic if your lines don't stay totally straight.  I drew a line with a ruler for the first line of stitching, and then just worked off that for the rest.  If it looked like my stitching was getting a bit bendy then I did make an effort to straighten it up, but you really don't notice a few wobbles or slight curves in the finished quilt.

The second time I made this I didn't round the corners off, largely so that I could use straight binding rather than bias binding.  I think it looks great either way, just personal preference!

One of the lovely things about this blanket is that it just gets better with washing.  Every time it goes through the washer the chenille fluffs up a bit more, and it gets a bit more cuddly.  I can see another one of these on my horizon soon...