Happy New Year!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!  

Hope you've been enjoying celebrating :)  While I am not a fan of making new years resolutions as such, I do find it a good time of year to take stock of where I am up to in my crafting world.

To start the new year off, I've written a list of all my WIPs, all the projects I have fabric for but haven't started, and a wish list.  Some of the ones currently in progress have been in progress for an embarrassing length of time, we are talking a decade in at least one case, but hopefully I will get there eventually!  The aim for the next few months is to try and shrink this list, and attempt not to add to it too much faster than I'm working through it... 

In progress, with how long it's been in progress for (I'll add links over time as I blog about each project):

Long knitted cardigan (about 7 years)
Big cross stitch picture (about 10 years)
Teddy bear (about 15 years...)
Star quilt (since Sept 2014)
Purple squares quilt (since July 2014)
A cushion made with leftover flea market fancy scraps from my HST quilt (since July 2013)
Rainbow crochet blanket (since June 2014)

Have fabric for

The fourth Wren and Friends cushion
Flea market fancy fabric in red/yellow/grey, I think this will be a quilt, maybe a churn dash quilt...
Some russian doll fabric I'd love to make a bag out of.
Fishy wall hanging for my sister
A cushion to go with my sister's wedding quilt
T shirts for myself, hubby and my son

Dreaming of

Another heirloom cut chenille blanket
A sew together bag for myself
A weekend bag and washbag for hubby
Some more dressmaking

I'm also hoping to make plenty more soap!

Wish me luck...

Can I finish it? Lots of Hearts

I am trying to get this quilt finished by Christmas.  And it's Christmas Eve today, so we shall see!

This isn't actually a Christmas present, but a wedding present for my rather grown-up little sister who got married last May.  I fairly obviously missed their wedding as the deadline for completing it, but they are coming to stay with us for Christmas and I'd love to be able to give it to them then.

The pattern for the quilt is a slightly doctored version of Oh Frannson's Love Triangle Quilt.  My sister asked for a king size quilt, which should have been sixteen blocks arranged in a 4 x 4 pattern.  Each block involves 91 little triangles to be sewn together, so the full king size was going to be a huge job.  I did cut out all of the triangles, but about half way through the tenth block I just hit a wall, and couldn't face sewing any more of those little beasts together.  Instead, I joined my nine completed blocks into a 3 x 3 pattern, and added two six inch borders around the edge to make a king size quilt.  I may use some of the leftover triangles to make a cushion to go with the quilt - when I've recovered from making this that is.

I went really scrappy with the design, with almost 30 different fabrics, most of which had fairly bold patterns.  This means that the nine main blocks have turned out pretty loud, and the last minute borders around the outside have worked really well in the end to calm the quilt down a bit and give the eye somewhere to rest.

I'm doing a few different quilting patterns; it's the first time I've got my free motion foot out in a good long while as I'm not very comfortable with it, but that'll only come with practise so I figured that I had to brave it sometime!  I am mixing the free motion up with a bit of my conventional walking-foot-straight-line-quilting.  I am just doing this on a domestic sewing machine - it's the second king size quilt I've done on it, and while it can be a bit unwieldy when you're stitching in the middle of the quilt I've generally found it easily doable to quilt something of this size on a normal machine.

With a bit of luck and a fair wind, I'll be back soon to share the finished job!

Linking up to Let's Bee Social and WIP Wednesday.

Emily's Quilt Finished!

I finished this quilt a couple of weeks ago but, being a Christmas present for a gorgeous little girl, had to wait until I'd given it until I could share it.  So here it is: Emily's Quilt!

I wanted this to be a definitely girly quilt, but not too pink and fluffy.  The recipient is only fifteen months old, so who knows what colours she will like!  The ladies at my local fabric shop, Coles, were very helpful (and patient!) pulling bolts of fabric out to help me find the right background fabric to go with the selection of fat quarters I'd pulled from the racks.  In the end I went for a dashwood studios cream polkadot fabric for the background, which brought the mixture of accent fabrics together well.

My plan was to keep the design for this quilt fairly simple.  I used six patterned fat quarters, and 1.5m of the cream polkadot background fabric, cutting them into 6.5 inch squares (to be 6 inches finished), and laying them out alternately in a 9x11 grid.

For five of the squares towards the bottom left, I replaced the simple square blocks with Emily's name.  This was my first attempt at piecing letters - I spent a long while figuring out how to do it, and I'm so pleased with the result.  It's now inspired me to try making a whole alphabet quilt, I just need to find the right fabric...

I pieced the backing from some big flowery fabric from my stash (I love it!), and quilted it with orange peel quilting in the same way I quilted my wall hanging.  I finished it off by binding in a deep purple fabric.  The finished quilt is around 54" x 66", a nice size for snuggling.

Linking up to Crazymomquilts, and Confessions of a Fabric Addict.

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!

Jack Attack quilt top finished!

Whew! I think that this is the most mentally intensive quilt top I've made to date.  Normally I can can just relax whilst patchworking, watch a bit of TV, and have a generally chilled evening.  Not so here - this one required a lot of focus and, yes, one trip back to the (online) fabric store to rebuy when I cut a couple of my diagonals the wrong way round.

But, it's done!

The pattern for the union jack part of this quilt top was a quiltalong over at Lily's quilts a couple of years ago, but I've just got around to my version.  It's a present for some very special friends who have just emigrated from the UK to Canada, so I hope they like their union-flag-and-maple-leaf quilt :) I was hoping to be able to post it to them in time for Christmas but I don't think I'll have it basted and quilted by the last posting day to Canada (Monday!), so it'll have to be slightly belated.

The patterned fabric is Emily Herrick's Rustique, bought from both eclectic maker and plush addict, with Moda Bella Solids in bleached white for the background.  But oh my, I don't think I can say enough good things about Rustique.  The colours are deep and gorgeous, and perfect for this project - I wanted to nod towards the red, white and blue of the union flag but felt that to actually use those colours rigidly would make a very stark quilt.  The quality of the fabric is beautiful - it has a really solid feel but is gorgeously soft.

I ummed and ahhed for a while over how to do the maple leaves.  My initial thought was to do fusible applique, but I wasn't keen on the idea of having raw edges.  However, as soon as I stumbled across this tutorial at Crazy Old Ladies Quilts I was sold.  Granted, it was a bit more fiddly to do maple leaves than petals, and you can see in the photo below that there are a few creases, but overall I'm really pleased with how they turned out.  Currently they are just ironed on, but I'm going to sew round the edges while I'm quilting it.

Oh so pretty! I can't wait until this is quilted and winging it's way to Canada.  Happy Christmas to my lovely friends across the ocean!

Linking up to Crazymomquilts for finish it up Friday, Confessions of a fabric addict and Richard and Tanya Quilts.

Rainbow Quilt DONE!

It's done it's done, my rainbow quilt is done!

I am so pleased with how this has turned out!  It's a bit wrinkly at the moment as I left it in the tumble dryer slightly long and the creases set, but they'll come out next time it gets washed (which, given it's my son's quilt I'm sure won't be long).

I quilted it in zig-zags, and have bound it in scraps of the green, blue, indigo and violet fabric.

This was going to be one of his Christmas presents, but I've already got him a few other presents and he's too little to really understand the idea of Christmas anyway, so I've decided to give it to him early.  I think a few games of hide and seek and a bit of tent building will be the order of the day!

Linking up to Crazymomquilts, Confessions of a Fabric Addict, Freedom Fridays and TGIFF.

Around the House 3 - Wall Hanging

Continuing my roam around the house...

I always wondered how much use pre-cuts (charm packs, jelly rolls etc) actually were, and what you could really make with that little stack of squares or strips.  Finally I decided that the only way to find out was to have a go, so I bought two charm packs - a PB & J by Basic Grey for Moda one, and a wren and friends by Gina Martin for Moda one.  I turned the pb&j one into an awesome wall hanging, and the wren and friends one has become a series of cushions (I'll write about those in another post).

I put the charm squares together in fours, and then arranged them on point alternating with squares of a creamy coloured cotton (nothing special, just the standard plain cotton from my local shop).  I quilted it using an orange peel pattern following this tutorial over at petitdesignco.  I'm not very well practised with free motion quilting, so loved this method of doing the orange peel quilting as I could use a walking foot.  It's really simple to do, but so effective.

I also quilted in the ditch along the edges of the large squares - that's visible from the back but you can't really see it from the front.  It's backed in the same creamy cotton as I used for the background on the front, and I bought some extra yardage of one of the charm square fabrics for the binding.

I'd always intended this to be a wall hanging, so during construction I added a couple of pockets to the top corners so that it would be easy to hang using a bamboo cane.

This was a fun project as it was contained quite a few firsts for me:

• my first charm square project
• my first time doing orange peel quilting
• my first time doing this folded binding, following Amanda Jean's tutorial over at crazymomquilts- I have done it ever since as it gives a lovely narrow binding and a neat finish 
• my first time doing a quilt on point

It was great trying out so many new techniques, and I was so pleased with the outcome.  It's now hanging on our study wall, to brighten up my day when I'm working :)

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...

Aound the House 1 - Baby Quilt

As I'm a bit limited in which current projects I can show you at the moment, due to the vast majority of them being Christmas presents, I thought I would take you around the house to show you a series of items I've made over the last few years, which are currently in use.  As they aren't recent, in a lot of cases I can't tell you what fabric line material came from, exactly what wadding, thread, pattern etc that I used, but I'll do my best!  And if anyone recognises anything, then let me know and I'll add a link :)

To start us off, this green quilt is the second quilt I ever made (the first was a present so I don't have it anymore) and I made it when I was about three months pregnant with my son. We didn't know the gender, but I wanted to make something for this unknown child, partly to help me believe that it was real.

I bought the fabric online as a fat quarter bundle, in large part because I loved the cute elephant print.  I then googled for easy quilts you could make with fat quarters and came up with a free pattern for this design.  I have since lost track of where I got the pattern from (which is a real shame as I love it - it looks good and is quick and simple to put together), but if anyone recognises it then let me know and I'll add a link!  The quilt used six fat quarters, and there were only the tiniest scraps of fabric left over.  

It's quilted really simply, with straight lines either side of each seam.  It was done before I'd even heard of the existence of a walking foot, so there are a few puckers, but given it was my first attempt at machine quilting I'm pretty proud of it!  I don't remember what the wadding is, but I imagine that it's either Hobbs 80/20 or polyester, as those are the ones you could get at Hobbycraft.

I backed it using a white sheet, with a strip of patchwork across the middle - I love backs with a bit of detail.

Rainbow Quilt in progress

I'm currently working on my rainbow quilt.  This one is destined to be a Christmas present, but as it's for my 14 month old son who is unlikely to stumble across this post, I feel safe sharing it.

This is the first quilt that I've made using solids, and I've really enjoyed the novelty of the big bold blocks of colour.  I used kona solids for the fabric, and they are gorgeous, vibrant colours (when it's finished I will take a photo in the daylight to show the colours off better) and the fabric has a lovely weighty feel.  I bought the fabric from plush addict (here) where they do a rainbow fat quarter bundle, which pretty much solved my fabric selection!

My original plan was to make each of the zig zag stripes in a single colour, but when I was laying it out it just didn't look right, and after a lot of playing around I combined two colours per zig zag stripe.  I got the idea for the zig zag stripe layout using two tone blocks from Amanda Jean over at crazymomquilts.  It's a neat technique to form zig zags without the need for half square triangles!  Each block measures 5.5 inches finished: 4.5 inches of colour and a 1 inch white stripe (the white is kona snow).

I'm currently quilting it fairly simply, sewing lines about half an inch away from the white stripes on each side.  I'm using red thread for this so that it shows up on most of the squares, a bit like top stitching.  I don't tend to quilt very heavily as I like the look of widely spaced lines (and also I'm also a bit impatient and don't want to spend days doing it).

I finished piecing this quilt top over the summer, and when I started quilting it tonight I felt incredibly unmotivated.  I think the novelty of it had worn off and it just felt like drudge work to get it finished.  After I'd been working for a little while though (with the aid of a few episodes of The West Wing), I really started to get into it and I'm falling back in love with the rainbows.  I just hope my little man likes it - it will certainly be good for playing hide and seek under!