Mum Goes Modern

My Mum has been quilting for about 7 or 8 years, but in recent times has been doing more knitting than quilting.  However, in the last couple of weeks she has picked up her fabrics and revved up the sewing machine to make this quilt for my cousin's newborn daughter - Mum's great-niece, my first cousin once removed, and the first of the next generation in our family.  The quilt was started after the baby was born in the middle of December, and only took a week to make - Mum's fastest ever quilt.

Inspired by this quilt made by Ashley at Film in the Fridge, Mum collected a variety of blue, green, aqua and grey fabrics from a local quilt shop, online, from Spotlight, and I added a few from my stash as well.

Mum didn't find this quilt too difficult to make - the fiddliest part for her was cutting the 4 1/2 inch finished equilateral triangles.  There was a slight extra challenge added by Mum and Dad's dog Whiskey inventing a new game during the making of this quilt - grabbing triangles Mum had carefully laid out and running away with them to be chased around the house.  My youngest brother recently moved out, so maybe the dog wants more attention now that he is an "only child".

Whiskey looking entirely sweet and innocent at the beach

The back of the quilt features a couple of the prints from the front in larger chunks - specifically Butterfly Sky in Green from Lizzy House's Hello Pilgrim collection, and Chevrons in Minty from Michelle Engel Bencsko's Simpatico collection.  Simple straight-line quilting a quarter inch off each seam line makes a great pattern on the back of the quilt and leaves it nice and soft for baby.

I think that this quilt is a great fresh, modern, not-too-girly baby quilt, and will be much appreciated by my cousin, his fiancee and their baby.

Do you have any new arrivals in your family that you have been busy sewing for?  Or maybe you have a scallywag dog (or other pet) that likes to "help" with your quilting?

Equilateral triangle quilt - coming together

I had a big push on this quilt over the long weekend, and got all the rows of triangles sewn together.  I have sewn 10 of the 14 rows together in two lots of five.  I will sew the other four rows, and the final three sections, together over the course of this week.

These photos are of one section of five rows, without pressing the seams between rows.

My incredibly sophisticated row marking system

It's a bit hard to tell before pressing, but I think the points on this have come out quite well given the number of bias edges.  I will do a little post about the ruler I used to cut the triangles, because I think it really helped with accuracy.

This quilt top should be finished by the weekend.  My plan is to get my brother to help choose the backing fabric (and to help me get some photos of the finished top).

Equilateral quilt - the design process

I have blogged before about the equilateral quilt I am making for my youngest brother here, and I wanted to share a bit of the design process that got me to the final mix of fabrics and layout.

First, my brother asked me if I would make him a quilt.  I'm not sure if he was totally serious, but I will leap at any excuse to make a quilt so I said yes.

Then, I had already bought an equilateral triangle ruler after seeing this post from Megan at Jaffa Quilts (another Kiwi quilt blogger, yay!), and thinking that an equilateral triangle quilt might not be as tricky as I had first thought.  So, I was looking for a reason to make an equilateral triangle quilt, and decided that this was a good opportunity.

Then, we talked about colours.  The colours in my brother's bedroom are grey, white, and touches of red, so we thought that those would be a good place to start.  Since he is 18, and won't be living at home in that room forever, I thought those colours would also work well in other settings and shouldn't date too much over time or become inappropriate as he gets older.

Next, I sat down at the computer with my brother, and showed him some pictures to gauge his enthusiasm for (1) an equilateral triangle quilt and (2) a quilt made with all solids.

The following three quilts are from Carson Converse's etsy shop, Carson Too.  Sadly, he doesn't seem to have any quilts for sale at the moment, but these were a good start to show what I meant by an all solid equilateral triangle quilt.

I couldn't hand on heart swear that we looked at this quilt, but I found it when I was searching google images for pictures for this post, and I think it is a stunning example of an equilateral triangle quilt made with a mix of solids and prints.  Not really the look I was going for for this quilt though.

Finally, I thought I would show my brother the famous triangle quilt made by Audrie at Blue is Bleu.  I know the triangles are not equilateral, but seriously, this quilt is stunning.  I wish I had the talent to put unexpected colours together like that.  My brother's comment - "I don't hate that".  Translation - that is pretty damn cool.

So anyway, I went home thinking that I would make a quilt using all solids, with crisp whites and greys, with a splash of red.  Audrie's quilt, with its mix of colours, was in the back of my mind though. 

After thinking about it for a couple of weeks, I eventually went to my stash and started pulling out all my white and grey solids.  When I put them together, it was looking a bit dull.  So I put back some of the darker greys, and pulled out a range of creams, taupes, tans, and light greys, and then found all the brown prints in my stash, and then a started grabbing a couple each of aquas, reds, and mustardy yellows.  Much better.  This is what I ended up with - 24 fabrics, in a mix of prints and solids.

The fact that I was able to pull so many fabrics from stash might give you an insight into the state of my stash (gulp!).  I did much prefer being able to make my selection at home rather than at a quilt shop or online (don't get the impression that I don't love shopping for fabric though).

I thought about consulting my brother about my fabric selection, but I decided not to.  I knew that if he didn't like it, I would be very happy keeping the quilt myself.  He seems to be happy with it though, and I put him to work laying out all of the cut triangles into a pleasing layout.  Although there is an eight year age gap between us, out of all our siblings (I have one sister and two brothers) we are probably the most similar in personality, and that came through when we were doing the layout - he was as keen to ensure even distribution of colours and value as I was.

I am still rather daunted at the thought of putting this quilt together, but can't wait to see it finished.

Has anyone else done a project like this, where someone else was involved in design decisions?  I am enjoying working a bit collaboratively, but it would be fair to say that I am seeking input and keeping control over ultimate design decisions.

Equilateral triangle quilt

I spent the weekend cutting triangles for this quilt for my youngest brother.  I laid out the triangles I had cut at my parents' place after our weekly family dinner to work out whether I had cut enough and hopefully make up a pile for each row so I could start putting the quilt together.

I worked out that I didn't have enough triangles (I cut approximately 270 and decided I will actually need about 360) and that more solids would be good.  So I didn't get to make piles to start stitching the rows, but it was progress nevertheless.

Apologies for the blurry photo - it is taken with an iphone under artificial light.  I am very happy with how the colours in this quilt are working, and looking forward to getting it underway.

Fabric aficionados will recognise many of the prints - a non-exhaustive list includes a couple from Lotta Jansdotter's "Echo" line, a couple of Joel Dewberry prints, from Modern Meadow and Aviary 2, some Martha Negley Feathers, a couple of the cross-hatch sketch prints from Timeless Treasures (in cream and red/orange), a couple of prints from Anna Maria Horner's latest collection, Field Study, a grey print from the Monsterz collection from Cloud 9, and a blue from the DS Quilts range I picked up a Spotlight.