BQF - Pigeon House

Pigeon House was inspired by a photograph I saw of dawn behind a Dublin landmark, the cooling towers at Poolbeg (locally referred to as Pigeon House). I lived in Dublin for 8 years before I moved to America and I always loved seeing the towers as part of the skyline there. If you want you can read my original post here.

Pigeon House

The MQG's Riley Blake Basics Challenge fabrics made me think of dawn/sunset colours and so I made this quilt at the start of this year, though I didn't finish on time for the challenge. I designed the top section in mostly 1" squares and HSTs, and the bottom is a self-drafted paper-pieced pattern. I took my sweet time with the quilting. I knew exactly what I wanted to achieve, but I had never deviated from quilting on either side of seams or some diagonal lines. So even though I kept to straight lines here, I changed it up in different sections to suit.

Yellow quilting around sun, black in buildings, and white on the strand!

Burying threads was definitely the most time consuming part. I'd never done it before, didn't really know how to do it, and trying to bury black threads on a black backing fabric is tedious to say the least! However, the effects are amazing and for the right project I would definitely do it again. The lovely people of instagram also informed me when I started complaining about batting fluff on my black backing that black batting exists - I have so many things left to learn in quilting!

Black Backing - thread burying headache

This quilt definitely pushed my boundaries, and even writing about it now has reminded me why I should do that more often. It was trying at times, I took a long time, but I really loved learning so much and now I get to see a little bit of home that I've made for myself every single day!

My new view!

I'm entering this into the mini quilt category at the Blogger's Quilt Festival over at Amy's Creative Side! And then I'm going to spend most of the next week looking at all the entries in all the categories, I love this festival - so much to discover!!


Quilt Stats:
Fabrics: MQG Riley Blake Basics Challenge Fabrics
Size: 20" square
Pattern by: Me
Pieced & Quilted by: Me on my domestic Brother

Blogger's Quilt Festival: Freya's Quilt

This is my second entry into the Blogger's Quilt Festival. You can find Paul's Rainbow Skittle Quilt here!

Find out more here!

Freya was born to friends of ours last January. But I didn't start making her quilt till this time last year. I waited to find the perfect pattern, which arrived, after much internet surfing, in the form of I'm A Ginger Monkey's Fat Quarterly tutorial on Sew Mama Sew for the 'Fit for a Princess!' picnic quilt. Then I fell in love with the Apple of My Eye collection by The Quilted Fish.

I sewed the top over last Summer, falling in love with how the pressed seams looked on the back of each block!

The quilting didn't happen until I moved home to Ireland last August. I chose a bright pink thread and to not stitch in the ditch (cos on your second ever quilt, why not be completely crazy!?!). I loved how the quilting turned out, outlining some centres and crossing through others.

Even though the sewing took me a long time on the top. The pattern is really easy and goes together beautifully. I fell in love with this quilt completely while I made it, and the idea of giving it away seemed totally nuts the closer it got to finished!

I bought a jelly roll of the Apple of My Eye collection and cut it up into 10" sections to make the binding. I love scrappy binding now, and need to use it more in my quilts.

Just washed!

I made Freya a little embroidered label for the back, trying to get the letters large and clear and colourful! I added my initials and a strawberry, which is my little added signature emblem thing.

This was the first quilt I got to deliver in person. It was lovely and I've since been told that Freya sleeps under the quilt each night, which feels amazing! I think it's the best part of quilting (which seems mental what with all the pretty colours and fabrics and designs and satisfaction of just making use-able items!). One more picture, cos I can't resist!

Quilt Measurements: 45" x 45"
Special Techniques: Diagonal quilting (special for me, that is!)
Quilted By: Me!
Fabric Used: Apple of My Eye collection by The Quilted Fish for Riley Blake, yardage and a jelly roll, IKEA sheet for backing, embroidery thread, and Warm and Natural batting.

Entered into the Baby Quilts Category.

Thank you so much for coming to visit my blog and quilt!!

Blogger's Quilt Festival: Rainbow Skittle Quilt

Find out more here!!

So I only discovered the Blogger's Quilt Festival last week from Gemma's post over on Pretty Bobbins. It looks like a really fun event and one I want to dip my toes in, so I can learn more about it. I do know that it's on twice a year to coincide with the Quilt Markets and run excellently by Amy at Amy's Creative Side.

I'm entering two of my favourite quilts so far. This post is about Paul's Rainbow Skittle Quilt, which was first posted about here! When looking back on that post I realised that I didn't have very good photos of it all finished. It was packed up to go back to America with Paul too quickly for that, plus it's really dark and wet in Ireland in January. So we went out and took some more this morning!!

A year ago, now, I bought a jelly roll of Moda Marbles in citrus. The colours in there are exactly the kind Paul absolutely loves. But then making it into a quilt dropped down to the bottom of my priorities. Once we decided to get married around Christmas, I knew it would be the perfect wedding gift for Paul. So I got my ass in gear and bought a white jelly roll, and began sewing the colours and white into pairs.

Once I had the big long strips made, I cut them all into squares. Then by rotating each square, which were half white and half a colour, I laid out a design (not before agonising through several). All it took then was lots of aligning seams and pinning and sewing. But once I got a few squares together the happiness of the colours really carried me through the repetitiveness!

The hardest part was keeping it secret from Paul and off the blog. I made an embroidered label for the back, from a picture drawn by Britta who has a blog about her awesome art here. But I just realised that I haven't put mine or Paul's name or the date on the back, so I think that will be my evening handstitching this week.

Originally I wanted to quilt around each of the zig-zags with the machine, in thread the colour of the pieced zig-zag. Creating coloured outlines of zig-zags on the back of the quilt. However, about 10 minutes after starting that (and two weeks sourcing all the right coloured threads) I knew it was not going to work on my home machine the way I imagined. So instead I moved to my embroidery threads and hand-tied the quilt. One knot for ever corner of each zig-zag! All in matching colours.

This was the 4th quilt I made, and the first I planned out by myself instead of using a pattern. I found using Adobe Illustrator really useful for auditioning layouts.

Quilt Measurements: 62¼" x 61½"

Special Techniques: Hand-tying and embroidered label.

Quilted by: Me!

Materials: Moda Marbles in Citrus jelly roll, Moda Bella White jelly roll, Michael Miller Rainbow Stripe for binding, white sheet for backing, Warm and Natural batting, and assorted embroidery threads.

Entered into the ROYGBIV category.

Thank you so much for coming to visit me! I hope you're enjoying the blogger's quilt festival as much as I am :)