I’m guest posting over at Lily’s Quilts today, head on over to find out more about this beauty:
Quilts
#ALYoF February – complete
At the beginning of February I set my goal to stitch 288 small flying geese and 72 large flying geese together into blocks!
It seemed like a huge task, bearing in mind that I had to decide upon a layout first!
My kitchen/dining room floor was just about big enough:
That is not all of it!
Once I’d decided on a layout I gave up on the idea of just stitching them in to blocks and stitched them straight in to columns:
I struggled with the quilt top looking symmetrical, so changed the direction of some of the geese, it resulted in a heart or too:
So at the end of the month I have a completed quilt top, not the blocks I was aiming for but I’m quite happy to have surpassed my expectations!
Now I have a plan for the back…
Linking up with:
A goal for February – #ALYoF
Life seems to be revolving around this quilt but it will get finished!
This month my goal is to get all the blocks made up.
This morning I sorted all the small flying geese into sets of 4.
Now they are sat in piles on my cutting table taunting me, begging to be stitched into blocks. Once in blocks of 4 I will add a large flying geese block to the top so it looks like this:
So by the time I link up at the end of February I hope to have 72 blocks that look like that!
Linking up with:
Geese, flying everywhere
I started the month with this:
and 4.5 metres of Kona Snow with the goal to complete all the cutting for a quilt top.
My sewing space now contains this pile of flying geese, all trimmed, approximately 70 large and 224 small:
This pile awaiting trimming;
I’m hoping that this is the last lot that need stitching:
And a test block I made to make sure my plan was going to work!
So, yes I met my goal for the month, I won’t say it was tedious and boring but it’s been a struggle, more on that another day!
Linking up with:
A new baby (quilt)
Last summer I made a gorgeous (in my opinion) baby quilt as part of the Zakka sew along using the pattern from Patchwork Please. It had quite a boyish theme to it, I struggled writing that because I don’t think we should stereotype babies or children but I’m sure you get what I mean:
Actually in my head it was really blue but obviously it’s not!
Anyway back in the summer some lovely friends of ours who were expecting a baby told us that they were expecting a girl, the mum is an English teacher and dad is a lover of books too so I decided I’d like to make the baby a Books for Baby quilt but of a more feminine version.
So on December 16; once some but not all the Christmas gifts had been made I did a fabric pull:
And quite quickly stitched up 12 book blocks. Again I drew on my text charm swap pile and found a few gems in there to use:
I love this one:
I then picked out Alphabetti in coal by Lu Summers for the border around each block, I like how the letters fit in with the theme of the quilt and it worked much better than any of the other prints I had!
Deciding on sashing was much harder, I auditioned a few but as I’d already used quite a few solids in the blocks it was tricky finding a balance. In the end I went for Aqua (Moda Bella solid) and I still like how it looks which is a good sign! At the same time as choosing the sashing I chose the border (Round in Purple, Chelsea Collection – Windham Fabrics) and then my eldest daughter (9yrs) and Tobit independently both said I should use the Alphabetti again for the binding.
It was my last finish of 2014, hand stitching the binding on the sofa on New Years Eve it was finished an hour or so before midnight just a few hours after the baby arrived on her due date!
The label was stitched on a few days later when I knew the name and the quilt had been washed.
It’s backed with some Amy Butler prints from the Daisy Chain line:
I like the bright and boldness of them not a hint of nursery prints.
We invited the family over for Sunday lunch to meet the new arrival and gifted the quilt to them, I think it’s safe to say they like it!
I’m hoping that the big sister might be inspired to make up stories to go with each book to tell to her little sister as she grows.
So my final quilt finish of 2013 but there is still another one I need to blog about!
Quilt stats:
Pattern – Books for Baby quilt from Patchwork Please!
Fabrics – all from stash and scrap boxes (if you have a specific query on one please leave a comment below)
Binding – Alphabetti in Coal – Summersville by Lu Summers
Backing – a selection from Daisy Chain by Amy Butler
Wadding – Super-Soft 70/30 Eco-Blend by Sew Simple
Quilting – Outline around each book, around each block and in the ditch around the border
Size – Approx 38″ x 47″
A goal for January – #ALYoF
Deep breath, time to make a decision about my goal for the month.
Truth be told I’m going to try and be really disciplined this year and focus on what I want to do, not pick up BOM’s or QAL’s unless I really have the time. This afternoon I finished off an essential project and have nothing else on my list of ‘must do’ other than the wedding quilt.
So the plan for the month is to get all the cutting done for the quilt, it might have to be interspersed with some sewing to stop me getting bored. I’m not committing to a finished quilt top because I’ve not yet calculated the finished size or how big a quilt I can make with the fabric I have!
This is the fabric for the top along with metres of Kona Snow.
I guess I actually have some maths to do before cutting!
Linking up with:
Made in November
A new month and therefore a quick round-up of the sewing I did in November.
Three notebook covers for friends and relatives:
This last week I’ve been sewing up some clothes for the children and pyjama bottoms for me:
And here is all the other ‘stuff’:
A bee block, some paper piecing, an owl bag, a scrappy trip quilt top, table runner all ready for Christmas, a quilt finish (there is another quilt finish but I don’t have photo’s yet) and an infinity scarf for my lovely husband using some of the leftover triangles from the quilt next to it! And there are a couple of cushion covers too which I finished yesterday so also need to be photographed.
I’m planning to revisit a few of the finished projects in the next week or so with a blog post and some more detail – bet you can’t wait!
Linking up with:
A Lovely Year of Finishes – November
My plan this month was to turn this:
into a quilt top. Not as straight forward as I thought it might be. After cleaning the kitchen floor and laying out blocks I struggle to decide on a layout. Many of my blocks had pink running through the centre of the block which made me want to leave out all the other blocks.
I ended up making a couple more blocks so that they all had pink through the middle:
I like it more now I have a photo of it to look at, I guess it needs basting and quilting next!
If you want to make your own, I now have vintage sheet FQ bundles listed in my shop, if you can’t see the colours you want just let me know and I can make a custom bundle for you.
Linking up with:
Do you have a curious nature?
At the end of September I bought a bundle of fabrics from Quilt Me Happy; prints from the Curious Nature by Parson Gray line:
and some coordinating solids.
I’ve long admired the work of Parson Gray (aka David Butler), delighted to come across a line which was masculine but not novelty.
At this point I had a plan to make a quilt for my eldest brother (I have four brothers in total!) I’ve had a desire for a while to make a triangles quilt and this seemed like a good opportunity to carry that out. I bought a 60 equilateral triangle ruler from Creative Grids, I’m sure I could have cut them using a normal straight ruler but I knew that it would be quicker and simpler to invest in a ruler and I’m really glad I did.
The layout didn’t take long, I decided to use the solids pointing down and the prints pointing up and laid all the blocks out on the living room floor, moved a few around and then piled them out ready to piece.
I really enjoyed the piecing, not so keen on the need to press each seam once sewn but my sewing space layout meant I could have the iron close at hand so it wasn’t the biggest hardship and the top was pretty quickly pieced:
The backing possibly took me longer to piece! I had a stash of Nigella (Amy Butler) home decor weight fabric and thought it would work brilliantly for the back, once I pulled it from my stash I realised I didn’t have quick such big pieces as I thought so I did have to do a bit of piecing (and maybe a little stretching!).
I quilted wonkily organcially approx 1/4″ either side of every seam line using Aurifil 2310 50 weight, it’s a fairly neutral colour and worked well with all the colours in the quilt. I bought a 15m roll of Super-Soft 70/30 Eco-Blend by Sew Simple and used some of it for the first time in this quilt. The quilt felt heavy while I was quilting it but some of that could be due to the weight of the home decor weight fabric too. The wadding seems denser than the Hobbs 80/20 that I’ve been using for the last few years, but it has a nice feel to it and the price of the Eco-Blend was good so I’m pleased that I made the investment.
I’m amazed at how it looks from a distance. We went to the park on Saturday and Tobi went off and took photographs so I didn’t see it hanging up but was really surprised at the photographs, it looks a lot lighter than I was expecting and I love it.
All I need to do now is label it and it’s all ready for gifting at Christmas. I had a stack of triangles left over, I hope to show you soon what I’ve done with them (although if you’re on instagram you might have already seen).
Quilt stats:
Pattern – made up as I went along
Fabrics – Curious Nature and Kona solids (specific fabrics listed here)
Binding – scrappy leftovers from yardage
Backing – a selection from Nigella by Amy Butler
Wadding – Super-Soft 70/30 Eco-Blend by Sew Simple
Quilting – Straight line by me on my Janome Horizon,
Size – Approx 60″ x 82″
Goal for November
Choosing a project for this month has been tough, there are a couple of things that I have to get done anyway so I felt I wanted to choose something else that would feel like a big achievement.
So what have we here?
Yes a pile of vintage sheet scrappy trips blocks, approx 40 of them, started back in April, I wanted to make a quilt using every one of the fabrics in my vintage sheet stash! I have left some out as they didn’t quite work; too low volume (hey maybe that’s next a LV vintage sheet quilt), but I have included some odd ones, they really stand out but I guess this is a quilt for me so I don’t mind!
I don’t really want to make more blocks so I’ll lay these out and hope that I can come up with a layout I’m happy with, then I will get stitching!
So my goal for the month is to have this pieced in to a quilt top, anything more will be a bonus, I can just imagine that it might take a long time to choose a backing for this!