Spring 2013 Bloggers Quilt Festival.

It's that time of the year again! Amy is hosting the Spring 2013 Bloggers Quilt Festival. I am going to enter this mini quilt in the ROYGBIV category. This quilt was made in 2011 and is hanging in my lounge room at the moment.


The pattern was from some sheets from a Judy Niemyer pattern I had purchased called Japanese Fans. But the pattern was for a huge queen sized bed with all this interconnecting S shapes, making "fans". I just took 4 sheets and made a circle.

I was in awe of how sharp those points were! It was my second attmpt at paper peicing, I was impressed.


It all came together pretty quickly. I did get a bit carried away though and accidentally reversed the direction of green to blue.... so the bottom left block here was tossed in the "unloved orphan block" pile and I resewed another.

Quilting it was fun. Echo stitched every second spike in a matching thread.

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And then pebble quilted all the white. Black binding with little white swirls to match the pebbles

Thanks for visiting, enjoy all the eye candy of the festival!

Finished quilt specifications:
Quilt Measurements: 20 x 20 inches.
Special Techniques used: Paper peicing.
Quilted by: Me!

A Fabulous Finish!

I finished this on the weekend. I took the binding to my real life quilting group on Saturday and spent the time sewing the binding on. Then on Sunday I got to sit and sew the binding down into place with the aid of my new fancy sewing lamp I got for Mother's Day!

 

I am so pleased with the quilting on this. Here is part of the backing.

 

Even though its quite heavily quilted, it still drapes nicely.

In hindsight I could have rearranged those lighter squares in the bottom right and mised them up in the top right.... Hindsight hey?

And another shot of the back.... It's in Perth now. The lady it is for, it's her birthday tomorrow and she has her third dose of chemo on the same day. That suxs! I wrapped it up and said you can't open it till Wednesday, tomorrow.... hope she likes it!

Last day of the School Holidays.

Yesterday was the last day of the school holidays. Daz had to go into work for a few hours so I had a decent burst at the sewing machine and got this runner finished. Got the top finished and the backing! Used some grey scraps. Looking good!

Then I managed to sandwich it and start quilting. I'm doing another giant spiral. Above is how much I do before I take off the free motion darning foot and pop the walking foot on.

Later in the afternoon we took the boat out for one last school holiday swim up at Elephant Rock. The water was so still, it was like glass.

The initial jump in was icey but within ten seconds it was lovely.

And then we watched the sun set and wondered why we would want to live anywhere else in the world? A perfect end to the holidays.

A Rainbow of Scraps.

I have finished doing all the quilting on the green quilt featured in my last post. It looks awesome, I'm very happy with how it has turned out. Of course I don't have the right shade of green for the binding so I have had to order some. So I'll wait till that arrives and finish that before sharing photos. In the meantime I have turned my attention to a quick and easy project. This is my box of scraps that sits under the table I sew at. Snips of various fabrics. The pile has been growing so I thought I would make something only with the fabric in here.

I cut strips about 3 inches long and an inch to an inch and a half wide, cut them just with scissors. And arranged them from dark red through to orange and yellow and then into green.

I have done five lengths although only three are photographed here. I have an off-cut of wadding, perfect table runner size so I am sewing to fit the length of that. Scraps of fabri, srcaps of wadding. I did find though when I lay out these strips that I could go further down the rainbow, I had the room on the wadding. But instead of going green into blue and then purple, I thought I'd go back up the rainbow, yellow, orange and red. It fitted perfectly!

So now I have trimmed it to about 2 inches wide and am sashing it with Slate Grey. This fabric wasn't in the scrap box. It is not a colour I normally use, actually it was left over from this quilt! Maybe I can still count it as a scrap as that was back in 2009!

Spiral Quilting!

I have finished this quilt top. Thank goodness for school holidays! I used the Kona solid Sour Apples for the borders. It's very green!

I was looking foward to quilting this as it meant that I could really test out the quilting ability of the new machine. I was thinking ditch in the stitch around the squares but then thought no, be more adventurous Helen. I have always admired the quilting on Krista's quilt here. One big giant spiral. So I took the plunge and decided to give it a go. I marked in chalk a guide of a small circle, about 10cms in diametre, then one a bit bigger, about 20cm and then used a dinner plate to mark a third circle. I used the darning foot to do the first 3 rings, then swapped to the walking foot. Wow, I am impressed. The machine is just gliding over the fabric. I am getting none of that fabric pull I fustratingly would get as in quilts like this one. And the knee lift was so handy! I'm loving the texture it creates, I think I have found my new favourite quilting design!

WIP Wednesday Week15?

Well we are back from our few days camping which you can read about here if you wish. Back in time to get back on the WIP Wednesday bandwagon. I think its week 15? Anyway, I am taking over the dining room table with all my green fabric cutitng up squares. I need 25, I have 24 here....

My New Sewing Machine.

My new sewing machine arrived this week. It has taken nearly a month to arrive which has been very fustrating. But it is here now and just in time for the school holidays which started today.Only had a few 20 minute bursts on it though as we are packing to go here for a few days. We are back on Tuesday though and then it will be foot down on that peddle! So far I am loving the extension table. Loving how quiet it is, how the fabric glides along. The only thing so far in the negative is no verticle big spool holder but I do have a free standing one that I used with my old machine, so no big deal. I am dying to do some actually quilting on it, that will be the real test of how good this baby is!