Conor's Quilt

I think I need to start actually naming my quilts and not just calling them after the person I gift them to, but I'm not starting today :) I made this quilt back in March/April time, for a little boy who just turned 3 last week! Conor loves all things farm, including tractors and has his own little one to 'drive' around just like his grandad.

When I saw Oink-A-Doodle-Moo by Jenn Ski, I knew it was the one for him. I bought my first ever layer cake, and set about sorting the fabrics and pairing them off.

I decided to sew them into giant HSTs, using the no-loss method.  One blender and one print to make up each one. Then layout deciding took a few days, and the whole of my bed.

Realising I want the blenders as diamonds, but feeling a bit messy.

Till I found the perfect one!

Paired blenders in each diamond, much more cohesive and still crazy colourful!

From this point the quilt was easy to sew together. And I had a lot of fun making the back. I used the end of the green Ikea sheet that has been in almost all of my first ten quilts, some leftover blocks (that ended up too small because the rotary cutter got carried away by itself - totally the rotary cutter's fault) and a lovely soft deep orange fabric.

Please excuse my jumper in the top right of these, running up and down
stairs was hot work!

Then came the marathon basting day, when we moved all the furniture in our dining room.

I've slowly been adding more and more quilting to my projects as I've along. I quilted all the horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines on this one - with a line of stitching a ¼" on either side of the seams. It turned out so soft and beautiful to touch.

I bound it in a sort of denim blue solid, and then put it through the wash!

I don't think that if left to my own devices I would ever have put this amount of colours and prints and patterns into one quilt, but I love how this turned out. It feels to me like it's right on the edge of crazy, and exactly suited to an exuberant 3 year old.

This one's been really hard to keep under my hat for so long, so I'm really glad to send it out today. It was very cheerful to work on during the sometimes grey and dreary spring.

Hoping to be back again in a few more days, with yet another finished hidden quilt. Have a great weekend!!

Late Summer Round-up

Hello, again! The summer has been slipping away from me and I'm about to spend the next, almost, month without my laptop. I will, however, have my camera and the ability to steal time on the laptops of others! Projects I've been working on since earlier this year are all going to be delivered in this next month so I can finally share them!! Yay!

In the meantime I thought it would be a good idea to catch up with the other little bits and bobs I've done recently.

Earlier in the summer I was tidying my fabric cubbyholes and tossed down these fabrics beside each other...

I've never been a big fan of pastels in my wardrobe, but I just loved these together. The patterns are all by Amy Butler, I've no idea which collection and I bought them in the first ever online fabric shopping trip I went on. The solids have just amassed slowly over time. That yellow in the back is not as crazy yellow in real life, but it just loves to shine like crazy in photos. It is definitely the stronger yellow in real life though, but I kept it.

I'd seen the hundreds of St Louis 16 patch quilts popping up all over the blogs, and been attracted by their simplicity and ability to show off patterns. And there was just enough of these cuts to make a small baby quilt, so I did!

I embroidered a little matching label for the back, and used the backing as binding courtesy of Rae's tutorial. Very useful!

The label's upside down , I tried inverting the picture but because I took it on a slope it just gave me vertigo, so upside down won out! I quilted it with horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines in a yellow thread, that blended surprisingly well, and used my walking foot for the first time. I am a total convert, it's such an ingenious invention!

I really ended up loving this quilt a lot. Even with the mess up in that central square! I drew out my colour placements beforehand, laid it out, looked at that block multiple times thinking surely there's a way to distribute the colour more evenly in this block... It wasn't until I was basting it that my brain came up with the 'duh, green, yellow, green, yellow' answer... Sigh, it's still pretty with 'green, yellow, yellow, green' in there. What a lapse in logic and reasoning!

This quilt is destined to be donated as part of Swim, Bike, Quilt's 100 Quilts for Kids.

I have also made a few small things as gifts here and there over the summer. First up, there are these burp cloths:

They are double-sided flannel burp cloths, with the handy little shaping to help them sit beside your neck on your shoulder. There are loads of tutorials on these, I read a lot of them, and then just went for it. Each cloth turned out slightly differently, for instance I now know that rounded corners all around the burp cloth will give you a much easier time when turning them and topstitching!

I also made my very first zippy pouch! Someone who started at Paul's work soon after he did landed her dream job this last month and headed off last weekend on the six hour drive to relocate for it. So I thought a pouch filled with sweets for the journey, but useable for make-up/nail polish/emergency food upon arrival would be useful.

The genius tutorial is by Pretty Modern and the pouch is completely lined, with all the seams fully encased. It was surprisingly easy to follow (I'm always a little daunted by zips) and I even managed to get the zig-zags lined up on the top!!

Finally, I made two hot pads from Patchwork, Please by Ayumi Mills. Some of the ladies in the DC Modern had made these back in June as part of the Zakka-Along 2.0 and increased the size so instead of bell pepper coasters they got hot pads! I got the book for my birthday so I figured why not go for it!

I'm not 100% happy with them. I used two layers of Insul-Bright batting because I wanted to make sure that no matter which side you used to pick up hot things that your fingers would be protected. That seems to have made them a bit bulkier and puffier than I would have liked. Again, with these, I read the instructions a few times, found them slightly confusing in places, got the general gist of the thing, and then did it in a way that made sense to me.

That worked and didn't work. One of those has a white tag for hanging them up trapped inside and no-one will ever see it again! I'm just lucky that I didn't trap a pin in there too. I think I'll probably use Patchwork, Please to try and make the fabric covered box later in the year. I need something to put hair bobbins and clips in on my dresser, but to be honest, I'm not in a hurry to start deciphering the instructions again.

And that's it. I have no idea as to what sort of schedule I'll be able to update things on when I'm home. But I'll try and make a couple of Finished Friday link-ups.

I'm hoping to start truly making and blogging in a considered way. I think I got caught up in buying fabric just because I felt I had to have it, and over the summer I realised some of the projects that have made me happiest are ones that came from my stash, from things I didn't love love in the first place. I'm also learning that I have more fun designing and making things from scratch, I'm not such a big fan of quilt patterns...

That being said, I've now found a sort of zen in doing the curved piecing for Retro Flowers (right in time to have to put it down for a month!). Still though, now I know the zen is there, I'll definitely be back!

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 :)