Bloggers Quilt Festival: starry night

This is my second entry in the Bloggers Quilt Festival, organised by Amy's Creative Side (thanks Amy, love your festival!).  I finished this quilt about a year ago, and called it Starry Night because that's what it reminded me of. It's entered in the Modern Quilt category of the festival.



I really wanted to make a quilt for each of my children before they got too old, so they'd be able to grow up with them. This one, for Thomas, started with a pack of charm squares of Kaffe Fassett's shot cottons. The full story of how I decided on stars on a grey background can be found in the original post about the quilt here.



My favourite thing about this quilt is that Thomas asked me to put the moon on the back, because the moon and stars obviously go together! He also asked for orange for the back, which is his favourite colour.  To quilt this one, I used a mixture of hand and machine stitching. I hand quilted from the centre to the points of each star, and around each one in silver, all in DMC perle cotton.  Then between the stars I added shooting star "swooshes" by machine.



Unfortunately I don't have a picture of the whole quilt at the moment but I'll try and get one in before the end of the festival!  I now have some pictures of the whole quilt! Enjoy!







Starry night quilt
Category: Modern quilts
Machine pieced
Hand and machine quilted

Bloggers Quilt Festival - baby bunting quilt

Well this is the first time I've been organised enough to get anything entered into the Bloggers Quilt Festival which Amy's Creative Side is hosting. Such a great idea for a quilt festival I think!

I'm hoping to enter two quilts, and this is the first - a fairly small, hand-quilted one, in the Hand Quilted category. This quilt was made before I was a blogger, so this is also the first post about it. I did put photos of it on Flickr when it was finished, but took some new ones too for this festival.



Inspiration for this quilt came from a jelly roll I had never done anything with. I decided to put similar-colour strips together, then cut them into bunting. I did some rapid learning about how to sew triangles into straight rows too! I didn't have an overall plan to start with, so I made some bunting, joined it to white triangles, and stood back to have a look. To string the bunting I added Kona Sage strips - I pretty much made this quilt how I make most of my quilts, making them up as I go along, with no definite idea of how things will turn out!



Once the piecing was done and I'd chosen a backing, I hand quilted around the flags, along the top strips, and then in-between the flags with waves, to suggest them fluttering in the wind. All the quilting was done on a traditional frame with DMC perle cotton. The perle is lovely to work with, once you've found a needle which is fine and short enough to quilt with, but has a big enough eye to take the chunky thread.





Can't remember how long it took to quilt, but it was less time than the double-bed size one I'd hand quilted previously! Here's a picture of the entire front and back:





And one last picture for you showing the bunting, the quilting and the back. Enjoy the quilt festival!



Baby bunting quilt
Category: Hand quilted quilts
Machine pieced
Hand quilted with DMC perle thread

The Graham quilt

Chances are, you won't have heard of the Graham quilt.  It now belongs to Killhope Lead Mining Museum (have I mentioned them before?!), but its story starts about 150 years ago in nearby Allendale.  And in between Allendale and Killhope, which are about a mile apart up at the tippety-top of the North Pennines, there's a journey to New York state and back.

Made by Hannah Peart in the early 19th century, the quilt is a traditional design known as a strippy quilt - literally meaning it's made of strips of fabric. This method of quilt-making is very much associated with this area, the North Country (really County Durham and Northumberland). 















The quilt top is made of three or four different prints, in seven strips running the entire length of the quilt.  Some of the fabrics are pretty faded now, which isn't surprising given the age of this quilt, and it's hard to know what the original colours would have looked like - I suspect there may have been quite a lot more red in the stripes that are now orange.

The back is a fairly coarse, creamy colour cotton.  All of the piecing and quilting has been done by hand on this double size  quilt, and the edges are finished by folding them over to the back and stitching down.

In 1854, Hannah emigrated from her home in the North Pennines to join her sweetheart Joseph Graham in New York state, taking the quilt with her.  He had travelled there a few years earlier to seek a better life in farming than he could make in mining in Weardale.  Hannah and Joseph married and spent the rest of their lives in America, writing home regularly to their family still in the North Pennines.  Joseph died in 1905, and Hannah in 1911.

Here's a picture of the quilt back, showing some of the quilting, which includes patterns in parallel lines, scallops and four-petalled flowers (you can see one petal in the picture above, enclosed in a diamond shape).  There are a few holes in the quilt back, but they don't look like moth holes.  In the photo below you can see quilting in scallops following the printed pattern on the fabric.

Amazingly, although Hannah didn't return to the UK, her quilt did.  In the 1980s, her great-grand-daughter brought the quilt, and letters sent to Hannah in America, back to the UK and presented them to the museum.  So this quilt, over 150 years old, is now back where it started and soon it will be on display to the public alongside the letters that Hannah and her family sent back and forth to each other across the sea. It's an amazing story!

Starry night

Today I can finally show you pictures of a quilt I finished more than two months ago - but the weather's been so dull and cloudy it was impossible to get any proper pictures of it! And I wanted the photos of this quilt to do it justice, because I'm very pleased with how it turned out, as is the recipient-to-be, Thomas (aged 8).



This quilt features wonky stars made with Kaffe Fasset's shot cottons, with a background of Kona coal, a dense, dark grey.  I started off with a pack of shot cottons in 6-inch squares from Cottonpatch, then bought more of the colours I liked to make some bigger stars and to make the quilt backing.  By request, the back is orange! But actually this really works with the dark quilt top and its bright stars.  Also on the back I was asked to include the moon, which is appliqued.  The binding is in the same grey as the quilt top.





Here's the back - the orange is softer than it looks here.  As I had to join two pieces together, I put in a row off flying geese while I was at it. 

So finally today the weather was sunny. I photographed the quilt on a stone wall a short way from our house. It's alongside a public footpath so a few people passed as I was taking the pictures, but nobody asked any questions!

I've quilted this with a mix of hand and machine stitching. I stitched radiant lines by hand on the stars in a  colour to match each star, and went round each one in pale silvery grey.  Between the stars I used my machine to quilt "swooshes", as if these were shooting stars, using dark grey as a top thread and orange in the bobbin so that this machine quilting is more texture than pattern.



I'm so happy with this one, and so is Thomas. The only problem is he's having to wait before he can use it until I've finished Kitty's quilt! And that's another story you can read here..

Please leave me a comment and let me know what you think of this quilt - I'd like to know!
- Vicky x