80th birthday quilt

Well, it's been a while since I made a quilt!  I've been sewing clothes, but not blogging them - I find them very difficult to photograph well.  A quilt, on the other hand, I love to take pictures of.



This one is a present for my mum, for her 80th birthday, which was last weekend.  I've managed to use up a great deal of stashed blue fabric making this (although there still seems to be a whole lot left...), and have only had to buy a metre of Kona white to complete the front.



For the back I needed to buy a three metre length (it's Dashwood Twist in teal), and of course the wadding (Dream Request).  Luckily I had some fabric that worked for the binding already (two prints which were similar enough I could mix them together).



I was rushing to finish this in the end, and finished stitching the binding down on the car journey south (I wasn't driving).
Here's the quilt on a chair Mike's just completed, it's the same design as this one.



Vicky xx

Cheerful rainbow quilt

A friend of my daughter's has had to have a pretty major operation, and I wanted to cheer her up when we visited.  So I dragged out a whole rainbow of fabric and my biggest pieces of wadding, and came up with the brightest quilt I could manage!

It needed to be made in less than a week, so had to be a straightforward design, and it had to not need anything I didn't already have lying around (although admittedly I do have quite a lot of stuff "lying around").  I decided on a rainbow, because it's always cheerful.  And to get in plenty of different fabrics and interest, I split each diamond into two triangles.

I cut the triangles last Saturday, and had them all stitched into squares by the end of Sunday.  Cut the background strips and had the quilt top finished by the end of Wednesday (when I may, or may not, have been working at home).  

Quilted Thursday afternoon, bound Thursday evening (in pale grey, by machine, no time for hand finishing on this one!).  Photographed in our garden on Friday morning, where there are loads of co-ordinating flowers at the moment, and delivered to the hospital by 11am the same morning!  It was very well received I am pleased to say.

This one's a win-win - a cheerful present and a really good use for some of that huge pile of fabric.  Can't see the difference in the pile of fabric though!

Vicky xx

Hexagons quilt

Well this one took a long time!  I love the colours, and hexagons are my favourite shape, so that doesn't matter.

It's based on Science Fair (Jaybird quilts), but I wanted use my left-over Kaffe Fasset shot cottons, which were all muted colours from a sample pack.  (I used all the bright colours in this star quilt). There are a few spotty prints mixed in there too.
I also chose my own size for the quilt - maybe the only thing I did the same as Science Fair is the construction method!

The negative space is a khaki chambray from Village Haberdashery in London, which may no longer be in stock.  The backing is a Kaffe shot cotton, possibly called Blueberry.

I quilted in straight lines about an inch apart on the negative space, to keep the quilt soft.  On each hexagon I quilted six radiating lines, and a circle at the edge.  This quilting is not so obvious on the front, but stands out nicely on the back.

Very pleased with the colour scheme on this one!  One final summery picture!

Bunk beds

For Christmas, my daughter had twin dollies on her list, and obviously they needed bunk beds.  My husband made the bed frame, and I made the fabric bits - hammock beds and quilts!



Fran and Katy are 40cm dolls (made by this FairTrade company), so the bunks are about 50 cm long and 20 cm wide.  They seem to sleep well in them, in fact some days they don't get up at all.



Each little quilt is 25cm x 30cm, made with quilt batting and binding, but no quilting so they're not too stiff.



Sweet dreams, girls xx

Some vintage hexies

Here's my grandmother's quilt:





Well, really I think it's a coverlet, as it has no wadding, just the top layer and backing. It was made by my grandmother in the 1950s, entirely from hand-stitched English paper pieced hexagons. The fabrics are a mixture of furnishing fabrics and dress fabrics, with a yellow chintz back. Between the hexagon-flowers, there are pale yellow and blue background hexagons.



Each of the 132 flowers in the patchwork is made of seven hexagons, joined to its neighbours and the other rows with two of the background (yellow or blue) hexagons. So, not counting all the bits at the edges, that's at least 132 x 9 = 1,1188 hexagons. All cut from paper and fabric by hand. WOW!!



This coverlet is big enough for a double bed. It's very well preserved, with only a few frayed patches, so I'm not sure it was ever used very much.




Hexagons are my favourite shape of all time! They remind my of bees, and how industrious they are.
I have a hexagon quilt in progress, and another hexagon project in mind - but I'm afraid I don't have the patience to hand-stitch mine together! My quilt hexagons are made from half-hexagons joined into strips and then the strips stitched together. One day I might persuade myself to make a small piece of paper-pieced hexagon patchwork with Liberty scraps, but likely not this year!

Summer Leaf on the cover!

Look what's on the cover of Quilty magazine's latest issue! Yes, it's Not Orange Peel! (cunningly re-named 'Summer Leaf' by Quilty magazine).

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

New shop!

I've taken the plunge and listed a couple of things in a new Etsy shop! Have a look here (new shop) or on the Shop tab above and leave me a comment below if you like. I'll add more things very soon.

So far, there's this quilt, and this bag.

Bag	Quilt

Hoping to add some more in the next week x

Hexagonal work in progress

I've been working on some hexagons, inspired by this quilt, using up fabric I already had in some muted, modern colours. I don't have a pattern, but I do have a ruler with a 60 degree angle marked on it, so I studied how other people had created hexagons and off I went.



For each segment of a hexagon, I'm sewing a 60 degree triangle to a strip of fabric, then trimming the joined pieces into a large 60 degree triangle. Then I sew three of those together to make a half hexagon.  Eventually I'll lay out all of those how I want them in the quilt, and join them into vertical strips; then when the strips are joined, the full hexagons will appear without me having to sew complicated Y seams.

And to finish here's a trial quilt layout, with some sage green chambray fabric from Village Haberdashery (London)

Orange peel

Just a quick post with picture of Not Orange Peel finally finished.  There was only just enough sunlight to get these pics...

First the whole quilt, showing how the stems (of varying lengths) and leaves are laid out:
 

Some quilting detail: the lines were machine quilted in expanding curves - marked out in washable pen


Along one side of the back, a rainbow stripe which uses one piece of every "leaf" fabric used on the front:


More quilting action:


And another part of the rainbow strip


I have to say it turned out looking really nice, and I'm very pleased with it.
Next quilt has hexagons on....

Not orange peel - quilted, finished, loved

At last, it's done!  I've finished machine quilting Not Orange Peel, and am really, really pleased with it!
Here are a few pics taken when I'd finished the quilting but before I'd trimmed and bound the edges.



The quilting pattern was inspired by a tree, with branches flowing and dividing organically. It starts in a bottom corner, and flows up and across the quilt, curving right back on itself at the bottom and the right edges. I quilted with Guterman 100% cotton, as I couldn't get to the quilt shop to get a big reel of anything like Aurifil.



Here's the back, which is my favourite Flea Market Fancy print, plus a rainbow border made from one piece of every colour I used on the front.






And here's the binding, ready to go on - lovely pale spots! (it's a print I used in the background of the front quite a bit)



To follow very soon - pics of the completed quilt (just as soon as I can get it away from my daughter's bed, it was made for her and she really loves it already - what more could I ask?)