Decision Made

Today I added the borders to Aimee's Quilt. My mum liked the colour of the pink roses with the blue inner border (top right in my previous post) but felt the roses were perhaps not quite a 3-year old pattern. I liked the butterflies more but wasn't sure if they were too bold. In the end Rob manfully stepped up and gave his opinion that butterflies and marbelled purple looked best and after some consideration I had to agree with him so that's what went on. I should ask him for advice more often it seems 'cos he was absolutely right and the butterflies look great - they also balance out all the white in the middle so it looks more 'girly' and less 'grandma'!

Edit: I was going to leave the odd pale lines in the top right corner alone but they started to really bug me (they're where the batik didn't dye right at the edges of the fabric). I've now carefully unpicked the seams up there and pieced in some of the spare border fabric - I have one more seam than there was before but it looks a lot better now.

Choices, Choices

Now that all the stars are pieced now for Aimee's Quilt I've run into a couple of new problems... What border should I use? And how on earth should I quilt this? The basic plan for the quilting is some sort of all over quilting pattern that I can run off on my machine - I don't really have time to quilt it by hand and paying for it to be long-armed would rather defeat the point of a cheap scrap quilt! Of course I've never actually quilted anything on my machine except for samplers so putting the plan into practice could be interesting. Still, you've got to start somewhere I guess!

I have a few options for the borders - I have enough of one of the purples and one of the pinks to make outer borders so I could go for thin purple/wide pink or vice versa, I could also bring in the backing fabric (my bargain batik) although I'm not sure if this will be too strong compared to the softer pinks in the pieced top. I shall have to ponder... Below are some snapshots I worked showing all the possible combinations.

I've finished the top

It's done; the extra backing I needed to finish Aimee's Quilt turned up during the week and tonight I managed to find time to put all the pieces together - I have a pieced quilt top and I have to say that the making-it-up-as-you-go-along approach has been suprisingly easy to pull off. Aside from the slight hiccup with the backing fabric I didn't hit any snags along the way; I think I should do this more often... It feels more creatively satisfying not to be working to someone elses pattern & methods!

Anyway, here it is in all its glory- the finished top for Aimee's Quilt. It's been photographed on my king size bed which is why it looks small - Aimee has a kiddy bed and I think that once the borders are on this should drape nicely over that and make a decent topper for when she upgrades to a standard single as well.

Stars

Time to introduce another of my projects - my stars quilt. I started this one after a trip to the Sandown quilt show where I came across Makower's (then new) Zen fabric range and fell in love. I bought a small jelly roll and a 8x10" pack of the fabrics with the idea that I might make a jelly cake style quilt (strips + blocls => very fast quilt).

Only problem was I already had 3 'sewing machine' projects waiting to be finished so I really didn't need another one and the fabrics were so subtle (completely unlike what I would normally use) that it seemed a shame to inflict a sewing machine on them! Thus it was decided - I would do a hand sewn quilt so that I could make it in front of the telly.

There's a bit of back story to this that goes back to when I first started doing patchwork (age 12ish I think) and my mum was all encouraging and from the depths of nowhere dug out her paper pieces stash from the days when she used to make tea cosys and the such from hexagons. I however had a book that suggested there was a way to make quilts that didn't involve lots of little pieces of paper and endless hours of toil and jumped straight into the modern cut the blocks, sew the blocks, have a quilt, method. I think she was a little disappointed I was doing things so completely differently from how she remember but she went along with it and even started taking me to courses and doing some herself and these days she's a more prolific quilter than I am. As a result of all this she was utterly bemused when I informed her that my insta-quilt had now become a paper-pieced diamond project!

After a bit of thinking (and that in build dread of the hexagon pieces) I decided to go with diamonds and to arrange them into stars in a sort of grandmothers flower garden pattern. The backing for this will be something neutral so I put the lighter fabrics in the middle and the darker ones around the outside. Finally I decided to keep everything split by colour waves - this may turn out to be a mistake but we shall see.

Anyway, here's the quilt so far (okay, so it's a stack of pieces of the quilt but you get the idea!) I've done the Brulee, Kir & Mocha colour waves and right at the bottom you can see the first of the Earl Grey creaping in. Also to come are Rosemary (green) and possibly Liqurice (black) although I'm playing with the idea of using this as seperators for the other blocks.

Back to the Beauty

I'm still waiting for the extra background fabric for Aimee's Quilt to arrive and since i've caught the quilting bug again I decided to dig out Fire & Ice (my new york beauty quilt) and do a bit more work on it. I started this one around Feb 08 at a class at the Quilt Room that my mum treated me to for my birthday but foolishly I decided that the wall hanging sized quilt the class was based on looked a bit small for using (I don't really have the wall space to display quilts so they go on the bed / sofa) and scaled it up a touch from the 16 block example to a 48 block monstrosity. It turns out the foundation piecing takes nigh on forever thanks to all the rotary cutting after every seam. I have 32 acrs pieced so I'm getting there but I only made it through another 4 today before even the ironing started to look preferable to doing any more - this is definately a quilt to make in small pieces I think.

What a bargain

We went to town today to take advantage of M&S's Valentines Day food offer and I couldn't resist nipping into Fabric Land where i found this gorgeous batik for 2.99 a metre! At such an amazing price I bought 4m of it so that's the backing/binding/borders sorted for Aimee's Quilt. Must remember to visit their website more often... their web design is hideous but the fabric is fantastic!

Making Progress

My mum came down to visit today and I wanted to show her the quilt so I beavered away last night and got all the stars pieced together - I didn't get a chance to put the borders on them but so far I'm pleased with the results.

The Stash Busting Begins

Today is cutting day. After a long day at work I decided I needed something relaxing to do and chopping my scraps stash into neat orderly piles of 2 1/2" and 2 7/8" squares is actually suprisingly theraputic - order from chaos and all that!

• Pinks: Done
• Light Purples: Done
• Dark Purples: After dinner!

Working out the Fabric Requirements

Tonight was math night... i don't like math :( Still, not too bad - just lots of adding up to do! Overall there's going to be something like 350 pieces in the quilt so that's fairly reasonable all things considered. I'm going to use up my stash for this one so i just worked everything out in terms of squares / strips. All ready to do the cutting tommorrow!

I've ordere a metre of backing fabric from my favourite online store so I hope that will be enough. Backing and borders will be decided once I can compare them to the quilt so that I don't overwhelm the blocks - not sure how all the white will balance out yet.

To avoid overwhelming this blog with numbers I'm keeping all the details of the construction on a seperate instructions page so if you're interest in precisely how many squares I needed check there!

Edit: 1 metre is not enought backing... needs at least 1.5m to get all the borders done

And On To The Layout

After a quick bit of research the internet appears to agree that a kiddie quilt should be somewhere in the region of 48" x 64". The quilt i'm copy-catting had a 5x7 construction (I think) but this will wind up a bit big with my blocks so I'm cutting it down to a 3x5. This will make the main patchwork bit 36" x 60" (8" star + 2" borders = 12" block) and once I've thrown in some borders should come to 44" x 68" which seems pretty reasonable to me.

The images by the way are made using Quilt Assistant which is a totally free piece of software that lets you draft out quilt blocks.

Block Design Time

Having decided on the design for the quilt I looked at how to make the blocks - one of the first things I ever made was a Sawtooth Star cushion cover... I think it took me all day to make!

The standard way to make the block is to cut the center & corner squares and then make 4 flying geese and stick them all together.

For the design I'm making this is obviously going to entail a bit more work to get the centre squares to have diamonds in them, and I loathe flying geese (I once decided to make a border for a quilt for them... is still isn't finished 6 years later).

Looking at the pattern it could also be split into a 4x4 grid and that's the approach I'm going to take - that way everything is either a solid square or a half-square-triangle square... no geese!

The first thing I did was draft out the two blocks I would need for the quilt - a search of the internet revealed no handy instruction manual and the construction of my 'inspiration' was too good to show me where the seams were so I decided to wing it and go with framed stars - it will work and hopefully look reasonably balanced. Below are the two basic star blocks - each unit is 2" thus the block is 8" square. To get the spacing between the stars the solid blocks will have a 2" border all round in background fabric and the varigated blocks will have a 2" border with pink corner posts.

A New Quilt: Aimee's Quilt

My friend at work is having a baby in April and I decided I want to make her a cot quilt for him/her. This raised a slight problem though - she already has a daughter who didn't get a quilt from me (because I didn't know here then!) and from what I know of the girl she's the type who might get a bit jealous.

Obviously this meant that there was no choice but to make her a quilt too... what a shame!

My theme for this quilt was pink & purple as I know these are colours Aimee likes and I happen to have a stash box themed to this that needs using up. My original thought was butterflies (no idea why) but since I don't know of any easy/pretty butterfly blocks a quick rethink led me to stars - pretty and pink now and hopefully still attractive when the 3yr old becomes 13!

After much internet searching for a quilt that looked easy to make out of scraps and pretty to look at I decided on the sawtooth star as the basis for my quilt and after looking at many pictures (I love you google images) I decided that the quilt below was the prettiest I had seen - I hope that the designer won't mind me borrowing it!

Fire & Ice

This is a quilt that I started on a course my mum 'bought' me for my 22nd birthday. We went on a machine quilting course with Gwen Jones at The Quilt Room and one of the samples she had with her was a New York Beauty - when we all expressed our amazement at it she mentioned that she was planning to run a course on how to make one... I think pretty much everyone on that course signed up before the date was even set! I decided I wanted to make my quilt themed around fire & ice because that's what the spiky bits reminded me of and since mum was very kindly buying the fabric I was able to get pretty much whatever I wanted!

The Inspiration: Gwen Jones' NYB

On the fire & Ice theme I decided that the NYB blocks looked like suns so they would have orange/yellow centres with red spikes. The remainder or the arcs would be light blue ('cos dark blue w/ dark red just didn't look right) and the background would be dark blue.

The Colour Layout

When I actually thought about what I wanted to do with my quilt I decided that I could use a sofa quilt so I figured I'd enlarge it a bit, I may have gotten a little carried away with that idea though as I went from the 16 block above to a 48 block monstrosity! Still, it will at least be a useful size when it's done and will give my machine quilting a bit of a test!

The First Block

And so it begins

After several failed attempts to make a nice flashy website to post detail of my quilting projects (and losing them all when the hosts vanished off the face of the earth) i have given in to simplicity and decided to bow to the inevitable and let google take care of things for me.

So here goes - patchwork and quilting projects past and present will soon be gracing the pages of this humble blog