A finished quilt!

I am ridiculously proud of this quilt, especially as it's only the third one I've ever made.



I had a bit of trouble photographing it, between the auto-timer, the sun, the wind, and my well overdue bump. Plus trying to avoid all the enormous spiders and spiderwebs which are everywhere in the garden at the moment!



You can see the back of the quilt there, in all its chartreuse-ness.

Here are some close-ups of the quilting, which I did in a swirly zig-zag, with accents of stippling and swirling.

I used 7 colours to quilt with, because I couldn't stand the look of light thread on dark fabric, at least for this project! I also could use a machine with a stitch regulator, I've got horribly uneven stitch lengths. For my first go with a free-motion quilting foot, however, I think it's pretty good. :)









If I were to do this over again, I would make a narrower road, with no white dashes - these were boring to sew and a real pain to get lined up around the middle bit!

Finished dimensions: 44" x 59"

The quilt top is FINISHED!

It took what seemed like forever (although in reality I had a week off while waiting for interfacing... more on this later), but the quilt top is finished. Today I bought wadding and curved safety pins and three (!) different colours for quilting with. I just need to sew together the back and away we'll go...

Here's the whole quilt top (click thru to get a bigger picture on Flickr), measuring 47" x 62", pretty good considering I was aiming for 45" x 60". Yes, it's going to be a floor quilt at first, although it's going to need a lot of floor space!



The light blue sky fabric was problematic: I picked it up from my local stacked floor-to-ceiling fabric shop, and it was in with the solid quilting cottons, so I didn't think twice about buying it. Almost straight away when I got it home, I realised that it was a MUCH lighter weight cotton than quilting cotton is. I had visions of it tearing to bits under baby's bum scootching. Oh dear.

I ended up getting the lightest weight fusible interfacing, which seems to have worked really well. Its somewhat heavier than the rest of the fabric, but the seams press down nicely and it looks good, which is really all that matters.

Oh, and a bit about design: I thought very carefully about which colours I was going to use, and I settled on a palette of true red, green, and blue. I was not allowed to use purple at all, so periwinkle blues were out, and I also kept out teal. There's a limited amount of yellow and pink, just enough to add a bit of splash and verve. :)

Every house is in a different fabric, stretching the resources of my very small stash! There's only so much fabric I can justify buying for any one project, though. Most of the fabrics are fairly new but two came from my mother's stash and are at least 25 years old!

Here are some detail pics of some of the trees and houses I sewed since the last post.

Terraced Housing:



Shotover Park (a big foresty park near to our house):



A barn on a hill:



A castle and the sun:



The school, post office, and shop, which will all eventually have embroidered signs on them!:

Bank Holiday Weekend

What I've been up to this bank holiday weekend: I started a massive mission to create a quilt for the child-to-be, something I dreamed up a while back. Since it will definitely be a floor quilt to start, it made sense to make a quilt that would be interesting to lie on and use. I thought about those car mats, whiere there are lots of roads and buildings and things to interact with, and went from there.

Here is my current rough plan:



Not too many roads, no. My first plan was much more literal, an attempt to reflect our neighbourhood. This one's a bit looser, but still includes our house, one of the semi-detacheds in the middle bit. Each square represents 6 inches of quilt.

I finished the middle bit today, which is very pleasing, as it involved a lot of brain-rending piecing. I had to be extra careful, because I only had a fat quarter of the green-with-daises-and-snails. I made it with a small bit leftover spare. Phew!



Here are some other houses, plus a church, which I've completed for the project:







I feel like I've completed the most difficult bit. Next up I'm going to create lots of road!

a quilt for baby rachel

A quilt for a baby who happened to be born before I got the quilt finished, but ah well, she's only three weeks old, she won't notice the difference.

I based it on the Amy Butler pattern Thea's Puzzle quilt (pic) (free pdf), but when I looked at the instructions, I realised that it was more of a string quilt, and I wanted more control over where the colours went.

So I turned to the idea of a string quilt crazy nine patch mashup.

I had my fabrics,



and to make certain it would work they way I wanted it to, I made a paper mock-up.



That's making a cut then taking the left side fabric from the bottom to the top, after each cut. Following the cut I'll stitch each layer then cut again.

So here's cut number one. The blue fabric was on top, but after I made the cut, I moved the left side fabric (currently purple) from the bottom to the top.



Here it is after the fourth cut. I kinda forgot to take pictures of those other cuts, but if you look at the paper diagram you should get the idea.



After I sewed all those, time passed. I'd originally planned to sash with the purple, but I decided to include it in the blocks instead, so I got the spotty olives-with-pimentos type one and did the border in purple instead.

More time passed, until earlier this week, when I quilted the whole darn thing, having finally got a walking foot. I'd wanted to stitch in the ditch, but also pressed my seams open instead of to the side, so they got outlined instead.

Then I bound it. I followed these tutorials with pretty much 100% success.

I just love that lime green and purple combination.



And here's the back. That's all folks!

Booty

Today I went to the quilt show and met up with OxfordKitchenYarns (plus FB who is not FB because he is First Born), LittleGreenBees, RuthCrafts, and Confessions of a Slack Knitter.

I got Stuffs. I was inundated by colour and technique and sell sell sell!


I seem to have renewed obsession with lime green, now with added pink! (Say what?)

But look at the Cee-ute oliphants! (From Fiddlesticks Fabrics, her shop had probably the best prices at the whole show.)



And then four from that place with "button" in the name that's got all the awesome Japanese stuff. (I didn't get the Japanese stuff however, because I'm cheap.)



And three metres of this amazing shirting fabric from Fabrics Galore. I think this is destined to become a Duro dress (Scissors for scale)



And finally some stuff I got last week at Purl Patchwork in Soho, NYC. They didn't sell fat quarters, so I had to buy half yards. Boo hoo Whahoo!

T-shirt quilt - finished!

If I had more energy, I'd have an artful shot of it draped around me or something, but I'm lazy, and our chip wall paper (as a backdrop) isn't very attractive.

So here it is, hurrah! All my favourite t-shirts of yore, carefully stowed for years and finally brought out to shine all together.



You might notice that I've arranged the blocks in a sort of checker(draughts)board between white/light and black/deep coloured tees. I think it came out subtly enough, anyways I am pleased with the arrangement.

I knew I was either going to use fleece as the sole backing or the batting, as my quilt would be tied every 16 inches - I don't think any normal batting would stand up to that! Of course, I forgot to actually measure said quilt and said fleece, so it wasn't *quite* as wide as the quilt. Nevermind, I sorted it out with the binding.



All in all, it's lovely and cozy and exactly the size of the top of a UK King/US Queen size bed, pretty impressive! The sashing fabric is shot cotton from the Rowan Kaffe Fassett line, and the binding is something random which was cheaper and happened to match. ;) If you'd like to know the meaning behind all the tees, click on this picture to take you to the flickr page, with notes!

Second Most Popular

I've been been slowly working away on the t-shirt quilt. My previous post about the quilt is the second most popular on this blog after the one about flapjacks. Kinda makes me wonder why two of my non-knitting posts are the most popular? I won't dwell on it... really.

So, I've been slogging away on my quilt, which has involved attempting to measure and cut the t-shirts into reasonably rectangular pieces using only a plain ruler and a fabric pencil.

And dealing with t-shirts which, once they'd had their interfacing ironed on, weren't quite square.



Thankfully, a friend lent me a rotary cutter, self-healing mat, and see-through ruler. I cut all my t-shirt rectangles out at her house, then painstakingly calculated the sashing so that each square would be 16" - plus seam allowances. See, usually when you make a t-shirt quilt you cut all the t-shirts the same size. I have been randomly cutting out t-shirt fronts for the past six years without regard to their size, so I had a bit of a pickle to deal with.



I cut and cut and cut. Booring. And finally, last week, I began to sew.



good



ungood

*rip rip rip*

Today I ran out of thread, but I got this far:



And all the squares are sashed. Time to start thinking about backing fabric...