WIP Wednesday

This weekend I had real hankering to start a new project.  I feel like the only person in the quilting world who hasn't made an interlocking plus quilt.  I didn't have a colour scheme in mind so I turned to Design Seeds for inspiration.  Since it's winter here, I looked at the various palettes under the winter theme and picked these three as favourites.

  

I pulled some fabrics from stash and cut a lot of  4" squares (because you can cut 5 4" squares, which is how many you need to make one plus, from a 4" strip cut from a fat quarter).  I laid them out on my design wall and ummmed and ahhhhed over whether to leave the red in.

As you can see, the red stayed in!  It's a Kaffe Fassett shot cotton which gives it a bit of depth and texture.

This quilt top will be pretty nice and quick to quilt up,  but I haven't basted it yet because I want to use a lovely cotton waffle fabric that my Dad bought in Japan and I needed to pre-wash it first.  I'm a bit nervous about using the waffle because it's effectively a knit, but I'm hopeful that by using plenty of pins to baste and quilting really carefully, it will come out ok.  If not, I guess I can use another cat quilt!

I'm linking up with Lee at Freshly Pieced:

P.S. I am speaking and showing some of my quilts at the Wellington Quilter's Guild meeting tomorrow evening. If you're a reader please feel free to come and say hi - I'd love to meet you.

WIP Wednesday

A quick WIP Wednesday today, because although I have lots of WIPs on the go, they mostly aren't at interesting stages.  First up is this block I made a couple of weeks ago for Tracey in the Simply Solids bee.  It's made using the Star pattern from Faith at Fresh Lemon Quilts' Summer Sampler Series.

 

I'm particularly pleased with the hot colours in this block - they really make it for me.

The next block is part of my newest WIP, one that I am very excited about.  My local guild, Capital Quilters, is holding an exhibition of members' quilts next year.  Each time there is an exhibition, a raffle is held, with a quilt as the main prize.  I am on the exhibition committee and am making the raffle quilt (although it will get sent out for long arm quilting - phew!).

This is block number one of thirty for the raffle quilt.  I am using a bundle of Tula Pink's Acacia collection with co-ordinating solids from Westwood Acres (you can also find Acacia at Stitchbird and Fat Quarter Shop).

The pattern is super simple and based on a Kaffe Fasset design - just eight pointed stars like this with a border.  I won't be fussy cutting for every block, but I just could not resist featuring the raccoon in this way - isn't he soooo cute?!  I am rather concerned that I won't be able to let this quilt go when it's done...  Also, between this quilt and a couple of others, I have a lot of HSTs to trim, so I bought a couple of Bloc Loc rulers to help.  I haven't done much trimming with them yet, and will do more of a review when I have, but so far I like.

Have you found any new gadgets lately?  I'm not hugely into gadgets, but I'm definitely willing to invest in things that will make the quilting experience better.  A good example is the little wee rotary cutter with a 28mm blade that I bought recently.  I never thought I would need more than one size of rotary cutter, but it is great for all that HST trimming - I feel like the smaller blade gives me much more control.  I'd love to know what makes your quilting experience better.

Linking up with Lee at Freshly Pieced:

Pistols at Dawn Quilt

Woohoo, my Pistols at Dawn Quilt is finished!

 

In this post I described how most of the blocks were made by the Fallow Group of the Simply Solids Bee.  Thanks ladies!  I love how getting different people to make the blocks adds a level of randomness I would have struggled to achieve on my own.

 

It's hard to see the quilting on the quilt top in these photos (it shows up a lot more in real life), but I think it's easier to see on the back.  You can see that I've quilted a big X right through the middle of the quilt, and then echoed it at approximately quarter inch intervals.

 

I've had this backing picked out since I chose the fabrics for the top.  It has many of the same colours and the design really lends itself to being used on a large scale.  There is a join in the backing fabric, but you can hardly see it - I like that.

This photo shows the quilting on the front of the quilt much better.  I used a bright orange thread for the quilting - unusually for me it is polyester, but it was the only thread I could find that came in just the right colour.  It manages to blend quite well with all the very different colours in the quilt top.  Below you can see the quilting on the back.

I have to admit that this is still not my favourite quilt, but it grew on me during the quilting process and I love the high drama of it.  I also like how it kind of shouldn't work, but it does.  Even the binding, a bright coral orange, totally clashes with the quilt top but also works perfectly.

Quilt Stats

Pattern: random half-square triangles

Finished Size: Approximately 64" by 64"

Fabric: Kona Hibiscus, Amber, Indigo, Lilac, Ice Peach, School Bus and Chinese Red 

Backing: Arabian Castle in Iced Lilac from Lizzy House's Castle Peeps collection

Binding: Kona but I didn't record the colour

Pieced by: The ladies of the Fallow Group of the Simply Solids Bee and me, on my domestic sewing machine
Quilted by: me, on my domestic sewing machine.

Linking up with finish it up friday at crazy mom quilts.

This quilt is the third of my third quarter goals that I've finished - yay!  I'll be linking up with Leanne at she can quilt at the end of September as part of the 2013 Finish Along.

Wellington Modern Quilt Guild???

The Modern Quilt Guild is an organisation with branches all over the world.  You can find out more about the Modern Quilt Guild, and modern quilting, here.

I definitely identify as a modern quilter.  Before I found the modern quilting movement online, I wondered whether there was anyone else out there who wanted to make quilts like I did - light, bright, simple, and not much like the ones I saw in most quilting books and at local quilt shows (I totally respect the skills that go into making traditional quilts, but as a wide sweeping generalisation, they are not really my aesthetic).  When I realised that what I wanted to do was called modern quilting, it felt like a big heavy door had been thrown wide open.  Meeting other people online, and now in real life, who embrace modern quilting has really spurred me on to make more quilts, and experiment, and have fun with fabric.

Anyway, that is a long rambling way to get to my point, which is this - a few people I know are tossing around the idea of setting up a Wellington branch of the Modern Quilt Guild, and I would love to know whether any of my Wellington based readers would be interested.  Leave me a comment with your thoughts - I would love to have some feedback to pass on when I catch up with this group next weekend.  Thanks!!!

My first swap

This weekend, I signed up for my first swap - the Scrappy Swap being run by Flutter.Kat who blogs over at Diary of a Flutter.Kat.  Part of the appeal is that it is low pressure (we are swapping a fat quarter's worth of scraps, a small scrappy handmade item and and a small local item), and that it is being run out of Australia which means that at least some of the participants will be over on my side of the world.

Below is my inspiration mosaic - I love bright colours but often don't use them in my quilts.  I hope my partner likes brights as well so I can make a bright little something.  We are being allocated our partners soon so I am looking forward to doing a bit of stalking and coming up with a plan.

1. A Light in the Dark - mini, 2. Patchwork Prism Quilt - front, 3.www.flickr.com/photos/38984834@N06/7949985500/in/faves-on..., 4. New iPad case for me to #travelhandmade to @sewingsummit, 5. Butterfly Quilt, 6. 2012-06-28 Drunkards Path Wall hanging, 7.tallahasee blocks, 8. Quilted!, 9. I forged ahead

I have also joined the flickr group for the Value Added Quilt Along, and I have started working on my own value quilt - a faux gingham quilt inspired by this one.

I am strip piecing it, so it is coming together quite quickly.  However, I bought four metres of fabric and I am using it all (apparently I have some kind of sickness that means I have to make every quilt as large as possible), so it will still take a while.  But I am already planning the binding - some bright and crazy print to offset what would otherwise be a very minimalistic quilt.

Umm, and I might also make another value quilt, because I think this one is too simple.

Dappled sunlight - nearly done

I found a suitable variegated thread, and quilted my dappled sunlight quilt today.  It is quilted about an eighth of an inch on either side of each diagonal seam line - I really like the effect this gives.

You can see the colours in the thread better in real life (green, yellow and orange).

I have my binding fabric all picked out so all I need to do is take out the basting pins and bind it.

Also, I am rather fond of the backing fabric (a cotton poplin from Spotlight), but no-one else seems to like the horses.  Please tell me - am I cracked?

Dappled sunlight - layout options

Since I got all my half-square triangles trimmed, I decided to try out some different layout options.  The photos are not the best, because the rainy weather meant I wasn't getting much light on my "design table" (a piece of batting laid on my dining room table - need to get onto making that design wall).  In reality, the colours are a bit softer and sweeter.

1. Sort of a barn raising pattern - pretty clean and classic.

2. Something a bit different - repeating diamonds.

3. Similar to the first option, but off-centered - I think it comes across as a bit more modern.

I have picked one, and have the rows all sewn together already - I should have a finished quilt top before I go to bed tonight.  Can you guess which one?

And to prove my point from the last post...

Oh, Ivy!

Dappled sunlight - all trimmed

So, I didn't finished trimming all those half-square triangles last night, but they are done now.  Its a very wet and rainy day outside, so the light is a bit tricky for taking photos.

Also, this is what typically happens when I try to take a photo of something other than a cat.

Really, you don't want me in this shot?

Now to work out what pattern to make with them.

The birdcage

I finally finished the quilt that I gave a sneak peek of earlier.  This quilt is made of scraps and nine-patch blocks left over from the quilt I made as a wedding present.

I didn't have enough nine-patch blocks to make anything decent sized, so I decided to slice them up into quarter square triangles and mix them up with the light fabric.  Also, I had never pieced triangles before and scraps seemed like a good place to start.

Really, this quilt is just the result of me playing around with fabric.  Once I had finished the central part, I decided to add the plain narrow border, and then the border of the bird fabric (part of the Nest line by Valori Wells) which was a feature fabric in the original quilt.  I really wanted to use this fabric in large pieces so that the design was shown to its full potential.

Once the top was finished, it sat in my cupboard for over a year before I was ready to quilt it.  This is the first quilt I basted, and the first quilt I started quilting.  I stitched in the ditch around the blocks in the centre of the quilt, and on the diagonal.  Then I had to work out what to do with the border.  I needed to do something straight-line, and decided to quilt straight lines from the inner border to the edge of the quilt, spaced about 1 cm apart.  It took ages, and is the reason why I got a whole other quilt basted and quilted before I finished quilting this one.  The border quilting alone took me about eight hours in front of the machine (not all in one go, obviously).  However, I am really happy with the way it turned out.  Close up, all the quilting lines in the borders make it look a bit like the birds are behind bars - hence the title to this post.

The back looks cool too.  The striped fabric is from Spotlight.  I am quite a fan of stripes for the back of a quilt - is anyone else with me on this?

This quilt is an awkward size, about 50 inches square.  A bit big for a baby quilt, and too small to sleep under.  Nevermind, I will keep it, since it is my first quilting attempt.  Do other people like to keep their "firsts"?  Since this was a keeper quilt, I hand stitched the binding.

Giant star quilt top

I have been working on a few slower projects lately, and this weekend I was overcome by a surge of impatience and a desire to do a project I could complete in a weekend.  I had seen Jeni's Giant Vintage Star Tutorial over at In Color Order, and I had a few of the prints from Laura Gunn's Garden Wall collection in my stash which I wanted to make use of.

Some of these prints are really large in scale, and I wanted to use them in a quilt that would really show off the lovely designs.  The background fabric is Timeless Treasures Crosshatch Sketch in black and white, also from my stash.  I am very happy with how this quilt has turned out so far.

However, I am not sure how to quilt it.  I would like to do straight lines echoing the star shape in the background.  For the star, I would like something that works with all of the fabrics - not too busy, and won't break up the semi-solid painter's canvas fabrics.  Any thoughts?

Granny squares are go

I put the top for my granny squares quilt together last weekend, and put the backing together and basted it at the same time.  I really wanted to do a quilting pattern that would bring the sashing and borders together so that they appear to be a single solid piece of fabric, while making the granny squares really stand out.  Time for some free-motion quilting.

I had done a bit of free-motion quilting practice on scrap sandwiches before, with limited success.  This was my first "proper" FMQ project and I was quite nervous to start.  The quilting is definitely not perfect, but once I got my sewing machine set up on the dining room table and my quilting (aka light weight gardening) gloves on, it went quite well.  The fact that I used white thread on white fabric helps hide the wonky bits.

I used a large meander type pattern to fill in the negative space but didn't do any quilting on the coloured parts of the quilt (that is why there are still basting pins there).  I will stitch these in the ditch to give the quilt a bit more structural integrity.  I never realised how quick FMQ would be - it only took me a couple of hours to do the whole quilt.  I expect that the straight-line quilting will take me at least as long.

This is the backing fabric - I wanted to use something bright and cheerful that generally went with the fabrics on the front, but that wouldn't show through in the white negative space (for example, I have found that when backing a light coloured quilt with bright red backing fabric, the colour can make it look a bit pink on the front).  This is a large rose print fabric from Lecien's Flower Sugar range.

It has the Ivy seal of approval.

Nearly finished and some favourite fabrics

I am hand-stitching the binding to the back of this quilt, and it is very nearly finished.  You can catch a glimpse of the binding clip in this photo below.

This quilt is made from scraps and left-over blocks from a quilt that I made as a wedding present.  The fabric above (from Valori Wells' Nest line) was the inspiration for all the other fabrics and colours in the original quilt.

The wedding quilt was only the second quilt I made, but I ended up with some fabrics that I think will be long-term favourites - like the blue fabric from Anna Maria Horner's Good Folks line above.  If I could easily get more of this, I would.  As it is, I do still have some scraps left but mostly binding strips (2.25 inches wide) and squares for the nine patches used in the original quilt.

I also love this herringbone print from Joel Dewberry's Modern Meadow line.  I have it in a couple of other colours for other projects but I am tempted just to buy some in each colour just in case.  Will post pictures of the entire quilt when it is finished.

Fandango quilt

A follow up to the sneak peek a couple of weeks ago.  I bought a number of fat quarters of Kate Spain's Fandango line for Moda off TradeMe last year, and started putting them together into a quilt early this year.  The white sashing is a white on white print from Spotlight - I was not quite ready to go the whole hog and use a true solid.  You can tell by the granny squares that I have moved on...

Because there are quite a few different colours in the various print fabrics, I wanted to keep both the block design and sashing nice and simple.  Chunky squares surrounded by a (mostly) contrasting border keeps things pretty simple.

Initially, I wanted to quilt this myself, even though it is quite large, at approximately 82 inches square.  I even got as far as basting the whole thing.  However, I really wanted denser quilting in the white areas and minimal quilting in the blocks.  I have done a tiny bit of free-motion quilting, but really need more practise and this was not the quilt for that.

In the end, I had the quilt long-arm quilted by Sue Burnett with a light feather design in the sashing and a heavier feather design in the border.  The inner square of the block is stitched in the ditch to keep everything stable.  I have used Sue's long-arm quilting services before - she lives very locally to me and is fantastic.  I will definitely go back if I have other projects that I think would benefit from long-arm quilting.

The quilt is backed with a striped fabric I picked up at Spotlight.  I think it works really well with the colours in the Fandango line.  It is bound with all those fat quarter strips I cut up.  Because this quilt is so large, and I have other projects on the go, I decided to finish the binding by machine rather than by hand, using this tutorial from Red Pepper Quilts.

Overall, I am really happy with how this quilt turned out.  I am particularly happy that I decided to go with the feather pattern for the quilting - I think it really brings the quilt together.

Linking up with the Kate Spain Blog Hop at Blossom Heart Quilts:

 

A sneak peek

I have a finished quilt but no photos yet.  I had it long-arm quilted and got it back this weekend. So I was forced into a task I was not much looking forward to.

I used Fandango by Kate Spain for Moda to make this quilt.  However, I didn't have any yardage - only fat quarters.  Therefore, since I wanted the binding to match, I had to make the binding out of fat quarters as well.  SO. MANY. BIAS. SEAMS. By some miracle, none of them ended up on a corner when I bound the quilt.

You can see another shot of the binding pieces all stacked up behind Ralph,

Ralph and his sister Ivy love "helping" me quilt.  They usually like to test fabric by rolling all over it, to make sure it is nice and soft.

Binding is sooo tempting for little cats.