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 :)

My Very Favourite Finish...

(...so far, anyway!)

So, Paul loves colour. Big time. When I saw a jelly roll of Moda Marbles in Citrus last April I knew he would love anything made with those colours! They were like a bag of skittles. Hence, the name of the finished quilt - Paul's Rainbow Skittles Quilt...

When I started, I spent a long time coming up with different ways I could combine the marbles jelly roll with a white jelly roll and design a quilt top. I came up with all sorts of ideas, and along the way discovered that Paul likes geometric and predictable. No utterly random mixes or coloured lines that start to disintegrate or collapse away across the quilt! I had started putting the blocks together (on the computer) into what I referred to as St. Brigid's Crosses (but which probably has a proper block name, that I don't know).

I had even planned quilting around each coloured cross in matching thread, giving a rainbow of outline crosses on the quilt back!

Paul liked it. My parents saw swastikas. I mentioned it to Paul, he saw them too... Not good. And once you see them, they're hard to un-see! So I asked on Twitter, and the lovely Sarah Lawson replied to say she loved the layout and I should go for it! So tempted! But the swastika see-ers around me won in the end. Plus it gave me the opportunity to go in a brand new direction, with all of Paul's requirements in mind, and keep the new design a total secret. Sold!!

Bloggy people have been doing lots of things with chevrons, and invariably I adore them all. I decided a rainbow of zig-zags would look great, and having to line all those pieces up would be a great next challenge for me. In the start I hated pinning things, full on groan and grumble and sigh and strop (I'm 30 - can you tell?) hate. But then I took a dressmaking course and we pinned everything. It forced me through the hate, out the other side, into acceptance. Not love, but acceptance of the need for pinning. Zig-zags would test my resolve!

First I sewed every coloured strip to a white strip. Then I cut them all into squares - this was the most tedious part, by far!

The happy colours helped too!

Once you get through that, each time you sew something together you see the zig-zag forming, and it's lovely. Really satisfying.

Plus, and this will sound corny, but it was lovely to sit down and sew something that I knew Paul would bring back to the States without me and use. Handling it and working with it, taking time over every seam, was filling the quilt up with me (and probably also filling it up with my hair - it falls out all the time).

It was really hard to keep this a secret. I loved it so much. I have a lot of pictures. This was the quilt top in the midst of basting:

I had made a similar plan for quilting this top. Tracing each zig-zag in a matching thread so it would stand out on the white quilt back. I went around and collected all the thread colours I needed. I began with the hardest one, the red in the centre. I got three or four steps into zig-zag. It went horribly. Really horribly. I've never found it so hard to make a straight line straight. This is something I need to figure out.

But I didn't have time before Christmas and the wedding. I had to have it done so I could hide it away from Paul while he was visiting too! So I sat down for two hours with the seam ripper and pulled out my disastrous attempt. I have no pictures, but it is imprinted in my mind. And I decided that I'd try this hand-tying lark I've seen other people blog about and mention... I've a solid collection of embroidery thread colours. And so I set to work. I put a knot in at ever corner of ever zig-zag.

The finished back. Rainbow of threads - I'm guessing, though I don't know that I've left the threads too long? They washed ok though.

Paul had chosen the fabric for the binding himself. More rainbow :) I also made a label for the quilt, though I wanted it to be something special and unique. I was a bit bold, I did a google image search for robot love and traced one of my findings... I'm telling myself it's ok cos I'm not selling it on or profiting from it in anyway... Yeah, I guess. Intellectual property is a weird area. But an important one! I then embroidered over the top of the tracing, adding colour with the threads. I have since done a more comprehensive search, and after trawling through sites in Turkish and Spanish, Britta is the brilliant mind who conceived and drew Robot Love!! You totally need to check out her work :) And the robots are Leroy and Janice!

I love it! They're almost too cute.

Here's a picture of the finished bound quilt,

And here it is all wrapped up and ready to go home!

This is definitely my favourite finish so far. So I'm linking up to Richard and Tanya Quilts and Confessions of A Fabric Addict - because this is definitely my favourite whoop whoop!! And to TGIFF at the Celtic Thistle and to Finish It Up Friday at Crazy Mom Quilts - cos why not, and I love this quilt so much I just want to share :)

Quilty Wedding Gifts

Paul and I got married on the 4th of January. Things have been nicely crazy since then, with a couple of days staying in Dublin and a few more visiting family in London! Not a whit of sewing has been done. Since Paul went back this morning, I'm distracting myself by getting caught up here. Sewing, and everything else I've put on the back-burner, gets looked at tomorrow! I feel overly due for a start of the New Year tidy and organise.

I decided way back (before we even got engaged properly) that I would make something quilty to give as gifts to my mother, Paul's mother, and his Nana. I came across this Fat Quarter Gang tutorial by John of Quilt Dad. Perfect! A bed runner (or as I took to calling it, a Foot Warmer...)! I never would have come up with that on it's own, or the idea of doing a gradient.

I struggled with finding a colour or colours to use. I wanted to make them all identical, to save time in the making and also prevent any rows about who got the prettiest! But I couldn't come up with a colour scheme that would satisfy all in their wide variety of tastes. So I started obsessively browsing online fabric shops (it helped that I was procrastinating like crazy over a report I had to write for my last job). Fabricworm came through for me this time with a bundle of Cameo by Amy Butler, in Warm.

Already sorted into a gradient! Woop!

I wanted to keep the whole thing a secret. Easier said than done, as I'm currently living with my parents. But I had ten days booked to visit Paul in DC and was really looking forward to getting back to my American sewing machine!

Rotary cutting on Election Night.

Finished panels for two of the three quilts.

I didn't finish. I did get all of the sashing done. But I didn't get to basting or quilting or binding, at all. So the tops came home with me, and I just had to accept that my mother was going to be in on the surprise! It was just as well in the end. The quilt tops were so long they barely stretched out in our flat in the States. At home we had to move the furniture out of half of the living room to lay out the backing and batting and tops!

Spray Basting!

I have to say that I'm not sure that I followed the instructions exactly. I knew my parents have a queen-size bed, and wanted to make sure there would be good drape on either side. My foot-warmers turned out at ~28" wide and ~90" long, I think. I bound them in white, and began by whipstitching them on. But in the end I ran out of time and the ability to sit down for long (hurt my back in early December) and so I just zig-zag stitched the binding on to save time and make them a little more sturdy. I would really really hate these, in particular, to fray or come loose.

I had an urge to quilt these in straight lines along the seams with a darker thread. So I bought this glorious looking spool in my local quilting shop,

Grades from dark to light blue throughout!

It was a mistake. But I learned. That thread is rayon. You absolutely should not try to quilt an all cotton quilt with anything other than cotton, really. And rayon breaks. It breaks all the time and really easily! I had gone too far with the first quilt to stop when the breaking started. But the cursing! Oh, the cursing! This is why my grandfather left the house when my mother sewed. I got there, finally. And swiftly switched to white cotton thread for the other two. It quilted like a dream. A dream, I tell you!

Finally, I added individual labels to the quilts, with the recipient's name and the date of our wedding.

I bought a fancy pale blue sheet to use as backing for them all. It feels really nice, everything washed well, but I wouldn't use it again. It frayed a LOT when I cut it. I really need to invest in pinking shears or a pinking blade.

The quilts went down really well at the wedding. And I loved being able to give something made with real feeling and love. I hope they get used often!

I'll show you Paul's wedding quilt soon!!!

Knitted Dinosaurs - an almost complete work in progress

This week, I've been mostly knitting as the most pressing pre-Christmas deadline is the last post from Ireland to England for parcels! My sister is spending her first Christmas away from home this year, down in Brighton. So it's very, very, important that these parcels arrive on time. For some reason, I left her dinosaur to last to knit... True, the pink stegosaurus was more pressing (having to travel to Australia via Washington D.C.), but the blue allosaurus won't be handed over until a couple of days before Christmas at the absolute earliest!!! Clearly, I have prioritising issues.

Just so you have an idea, here are the finished dinosaurs!

The fearsome Allosaurus - on the hunt for biscuits, near you!

A stegosaurus for a little girl.

And the state of the one to be posted Friday....

One dissected dinosaur!

I just finished knitting all his legs and horns and tail clubs today. Tomorrow it will be a frenzy of stitching and stuffing to get this guy ready!! Wish me luck.

My other works in progress this week have been the quilting on my bed runners. Two quilted, one to go, and then the binding to make and put on... Here's one I quilted earlier :)

There's another (secret) quilt waiting in the wings to be quilted and bound as well. So I've plenty to keep me busy along with all the regular Christmas shopping and prep.

This is my first time linking up to Freshly Pieced's WIP Wednesday, can't wait to see what other people are making!

A change of plans...

After everyone in my house telling me that the first thing they saw when they looked at my quilt plan was swastikas I got a bit worried. I said as much yesterday. So I posted the plan to Twitter to see if people agreed. One person (Sara at SewSweetness) didn't agree (yay - she was on my side!), but in the end I decided it's better to be safe than sorry with swastikas (especially as my planned quilting may have only highlighted their presence!).

The swastikas are in white - I still like the overall appearance of jumbled yet ordered colour in this design... Oh, quilt front on the left, and planned quilting for the back on the right.

So I re-designed. And I love it! So much it's a secret from the quilt-getter now, and this will be the last picture I post until after they have it.

Aren't the Moda Citrus Marbles just delicious!? (The Fat Quarter Shop has 25% off everything till next Thursday with the discount code 'jingle'!)

I do really love my new plan. But, I think I'm going to have to play with jumbled up colours and geometric shapes at some point, and the leftover cuts from making this quilt may turn out to be perfect... Maybe playing with something like Jeni B's (from In Color Order) Arithmetic Quilt?

Something to ponder in the New Year! Now to get back to the 5 quilts I've to finish this year.

A x

Paul's Rainbow Skittle Quilt - a work in progress

Today I'm working on these:

They're a Moda Marbles Jelly Roll (in citrus) fused with a Moda Bella Snow Jelly Roll.

The last few days has seen these big long strips cut into hundreds of little squares, way more than I need for the quilt I have planned. I think the extras may become another quilt, maybe a crib size...

Squares!

But that's part of the problem - I've no idea how big the current quilt I'm working on will turn out. I don't trust my self-drawn out plans enough, yet. So, before I buy the batting, I need to make the quilt top and measure! Hopefully by tomorrow evening I'll know for sure how big this quilt is.

The quilt is a gift, though the plans have already been given the go ahead by the giftee (important, as I hadn't realised how much he liked order and straight lines and no quirkily placed 'wrong' squares). Maybe I'll go free rein on the leftovers :)

The second problem, and one we'll just have to wait and see what it looks like when pieced, is that while I've designed a series of St Brigid's Cross-like blocks, the white comes together in adjacent blocks to create swastikas.... eep! As I said the design has been given the go-ahead from on high, but once it's pieced I'll have to see how noticeable this is! It's not for show or for selling though, just personal use - maybe it won't matter...??

Stay tuned, we'll have another look tomorrow night!