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

Pigeon House

Last August I agreed to take part in the MQG's Riley Blake Challenge. Participants got 6 fat eighths of fabrics from Riley Blake's basics collection, we could make anything once it was quilted and could add any solid or any Riley Blake printed fabric. The deadline was sometime in February. I missed it. Understatement. Though most of the work, including the quilting, was done the few days right before the deadline. I semi-lie, most of the quilting was done the night before the deadline. Then I got to the buildings, realised how much I like sleeping, and how crazy sewing black thread on dark grey at night was, and gave up.

I'm glad I caved. I'm also glad I busted ass for the deadline. Without the challenge I may have never made anything like this ever. Tiny pieces, inspired by the real world, crazy dense quilting, self-drafted paper-piecing, starting and stopping quilting in the middle of the quilt, burying threads - I'd never done any of those things before this.

I also learned tonnes. For instance, I should have starched before I even started cutting for this project. I probably should have used interfacing for piecing the top section. The base has two different greys in it, because my ability to paper piece, think in mirror image, and work out triangles flipping over, are all limited. This required an eleventh hour trip to my local Hancocks when I still thought that I could finish on time if I busted ass till like 3am.

It is so far from perfect. And after spending the last 4 months putting it down and picking it up to bury what felt like a million black threads into the black backing and cursing myself for the zillionth time, I see all the imperfections. However, I'm proud that I finished it. That it isn't still languishing on the corner of the sofa. Getting the stink-eye thrown at it intermittently. I'm proud that one small piece of work can hold quite so many pieces of information, and maybe by putting it in my regular line of sight I won't forget those lessons when it comes to the next project. Mostly I'm glad it's done.

You'll notice it's also not flat or square - the wall or pins are hiding
that for now!

The other nice thing about it is that it's a tiny little non-cliché piece of home. It's not green, there are no leprechauns, and definitely no diddly-aye fiddles playing. That is dawn from behind a power generating station in Dublin. I struggled with the colours and prints that the Riley Blake fabrics came in for a couple of months, and then decided to just think about the broad colours and see what I could interpret them as. As I was busy racking my brain for all kinds of inspiration, I came across this photo taken by @botsbushman of Poolbeg Generating Station (or Pigeon House, as we've always called it).

Picture's a link to this instagram pic!

Dublin is not a very high-rise city so the chimneys at Pigeon House can be seen from a lot of places, and are a well known landmark. I've also spent a lot of time travelling up and down to Dublin along the coast by train watching the sunrise, so this seemed like the perfect inspiration. And still a challenge to get those fabrics to work.

Seriously stumping, though the resulting Challenge Quilts were stunning!

Linking up with Pretty Bobbins' I Quilt linky hosted over at Blossom Heart Quilts this week!

December's techno/sewing effort

At the start of December I started a new block for the Farmer's Wife Quilt. I was still in Ireland and had found a handy tray to tote my hand-sewing paraphenalia around the house. Because it wasn't constantly getting scooped up and moved off the sofa (other people always want to sit where my sewing is - so annoying, damn those people), I suddenly thought I could take a picture every day and be able to see my progress.

Then I wanted to make the photos into a flickbook type video and I took to google to learn how. After struggling through various tutorials for Photoshop (all of which written from Macs for some reason, and I'm a PC girl), my wonderful husband decided to help and did it in 10 minutes in Microsoft Paint - who knew!??

Some disclaimers, this is my first gif, the compression of the pictures has caused some weird artefacts in places, and also Ireland in December means all sorts of funky lighting.

So here it is, if I can figure out how to make this upload and also run - fingers crossed! The block is  #43 Garden Path, has 44 pieces and finishes at 6".

1500 CT Ok, this isn't working right now, but I'll try and troubleshoot it over the next couple of hours as I can :)

1513 CT That didn't take long - woop!!

When I do this little experiment again I will definitely make sure I take the picture at the same time of day each day for constant light, and I'll also get a tripod for the camera so the distance from the block is the same. Still though I'm glad I did it, I love the block and it was fun to experiment with new things (to me).

Now I'll have to learn how to add some music.

We are now in Houston. We're largely unpacked though there are still piles of things in corners and the odd box hanging about. I got my sewing machine out at the start of this week and have begun a little bit of making. In fact, I'm seeing if I can last minute make my mini-quilt for the MQG Riley Blake Basics Challenge.

I might be mad (239 sqaures plus a paper pieced bottom not pictured), but it's nice to not be wrestling cardboard and packing tape each day!

Fingers crossed the mini is made by Sunday night - I'll pop it up here as soon as I finish :)

Have a Happy Valentine's Day - I hope there's some figure skating on tomorrow, so much glitter!!

Oh, and thank you for all the little bits of distraction and pretty I've gotten from your blogs over the last two months - totally sanity saving! x