Isaac's Quilt

Rob's cousin had a little baby boy a couple of months ago and this seemed like a great excuse to make a quilt so I set to work on a quilt for him.  I was slowed down by an evil cold but managed to get it finished in time to give him on Boxing Day when they came round for lunch.

The idea from this came from Oh Fransson's  Simple Modern Baby Quilt (a picture of which I can no longer find on the internet but which was very similar to the Frames pattern in her store)

Whilst little Isaac is only 2 months old at the moment I knew that his mum had made him several crocheted baby blankets so I decided to make a quilt that he could play on now and maybe use as an actual quilt when he's a bit older.  With this in mind I added a pillow case to the back (making Quillow!) so that the quilt can easily be folded up out of the way when it's not being used

To make the back a little more interesting I added a row of blocks across the top.  These align with the blocks on the front (more or less) so that the quilting looks (about) right on these - I started at the centre block but the quilt shifted slightly as I worked outwards and the left hand alligators are a little out of line with the front.

The quilting is quite simple, I outlined the centre animal block and echoed the outer seams of the blocks to create a sort of picture frame effect. 

Details of Assembly (for future reference!)

The quilt uses 5 different animal prints each framed with a different colour of solid fabric:


Solids:
Kona Chocolate (2m, also used for the backing & quillow - this is used in its entirelty, 2 1/2m would give some wiggle room!)
Kona Deep Blue 1/2 m
Kona Dusty Blue 1/2 m
Kona Denim 1/2 m
Kona Cactus 3/4 m (also used for the binding)

Prints:
Alexander Henry 2-D Zoo Blue 1/2m (needed to get the fussy cuts and the pillow front)
Ed Emberly Happy Drawing - Alligators 1 fat quarter
Robert Kaufman Urban Zoologie Turtle Grass 1 fat quarter
Robert Kaufman Urban Zoologie Monkey Blue 1 fat quarter
Robert Kaufman Urban Zoologie Owls Blue 1 fat quarter

The wadding is Hobbs Heirloom 100% Natural Cotton without scrim

Quilt Top

All seams are 1/4"

The quilt is made out of 8 framed squares of each animal print/solid combination which finish at 8" square. For each pair of fabrics:

• Cut 8 squares of print fabric at 4 1/2"
• Cut 5 2 1/2" WOF strips from the solid fabric, fold the strips in half.
• From 2 folded strips start at the raw ends and cut one 8 1/2 set and two 4 1/2" sets.  Iron the left over pieces flat and cut to 4 1/2" to make a third set
• From the 3 remaining folded strips start at the raw ends and cut two 8 1/2" sets and one 4 1/2" set (depending on the generosity of your fabric you may need to use the selvedge to make this fit, if you prefer you can cut one more WOF strip and cut any remaining 4 1/2" strips from this)
• Assemble the blocks by joining two 4 1/2" strips to opposite side of each square and then joining two 8 1/2" strips to the other sides to make a square block.

Take the squares and lay them out in a 5x7 grid so that no two fabrics of the same colour are touching (see the picture - there is a specific layout that accomplishes this). There will be 5 squares left over, keep these for the back of the quilt.

Assemble the blocks into 7 rows, assemble the rows into two halves (one of 3 rows, one of 4) and join the halves together to make the quilt top (finished size will be 40 x 56)

Quillow Preparation

To prepare the quillow make two squares of 2-D Zoo framed in chocolate.  The squares are 10 1/2" cut and are framed with strips of chocolate ( two 2 1/2 x 10 1/2  strips and 2 1/2 x  14 1/2 strips per square) to give a 14" finished cushion (or 14 1/2" before they are sewn into the quilt)

Backing

The backing is made out of the chocolate fabric, provided the fabric is the standard 42" wide there is no need for any width-ways joins and the following pieces are needed:

• Cut a WOF strip 4 1/2" wide (the top piece)
• Cut a WOF block 38 1/2" wide (the middle piece)
• Cut a WOF strip 14 1/2" wide (the bottom piece).  

The backing is assembled as follows:

• Take the remaining 5 print squares, arrange in an order to suit and assemble into a row.
• Take the bottom piece of backing and remove a 14 1/2" square from the centre of the strip (fold in half and measure 7 1/4" from the fold)
• Replace the missing piece with one of the framed quillow squares and join into a strip
• Join the top piece of backing to the top of the print squares.
• Join the middle piece of backing to the bottom of the print squares.
• Join the bottom piece of backing (with the quillow square in it) to the bottom of the middle piece.

Assembly & Quilting 

Sandwich the quilt together as normal with the wadding being very careful to align the backing to the front of the quilt, there is a little excess backing fabric to the sides but the top and bottom need to match exactly.  Try to line up the print squares on the back to the front.

Baste the quilt thoroughly  with pins or thread (I wouldn't recommend using spray on a baby quilt).

Quilt as desired!  In the ditch along the main seams would be the quickest way to finish the quilt (as long as your wadding is okay with 8" quilting spacing).  I chose to quilt frames on each square with each line being "one-walking-foot's-width" from the seams.

Binding the Quilt & Adding the Quillow

Take the remaining quillow square and sandwich with the chocolate square removed from the backing piece. Quilt as desired then bind three of the edges (left,top,right) with the remaining chocolate fabric (I managed to squeeze 2" strips out of the last of the fabric)

Turn the main quilt over to the back and align the quillow square with the bottom edge and centre it horizontally. Pin securely in place.

Cut 5 x 2" WOF strips from the Cactus fabric (on the straight of the grain , not bias), join together into one long strip and iron in half to make binding. 

Start on one of the long sides of the quilt and machine the binding onto the front of the quilt, as you pass along the bottom edge of the quilt make sure you are sewing through the quillow square as well as the main quilt.

Wrap the binding around onto the back of the quilt and hand sew in place.

Go back to the Quillow which is now attached at the bottom.  Hand sew the two sides of the pillow to the back of the quilt (through the backing and preferably the wadding but not through to the front of the quilt).  To reinforce these seams I sewed them 3 times!

To fold the quilt lay it flat on the floor with the front side facing you. Fold the two long sides inwards so that the quilt is folded into thirds with the middle third (and pillow) touching the floor.  Fold the quilt towards you from the top folding into quarters and then turn over to the back.  Put hands inside the quillow and grab the inside corners and as much folded quilt as you can and use them to turn the quilt through into the pillow.

Christmas Cards

At Christmas we try to make a trip up to Leeds to see Rob's extended family but this year we realised that it wasn't going to work out.  Because we weren't going to see them we wanted to send a little something up to them so I put together these little trees which we posted as Christmas Cards.  I like to think that they'd make great mug-rugs but I'm having trouble convincing people that it's okay to put dirty things on quilts so I've settled for pretty-little-Christmas-decoration-things!

The trees are all 4x6 finished size and were made with a mixture of techniques - I started by strip-piecing  1.5" strips  (giving 1" finished stripes) of green fabric into a block and then sliced the trees out of the made-fabric.

Next, I pieced the tree trunks into the white 'snow' fabric (2" snow / 1.5" trunk / 2" snow for a 4" finished piece).

Finally, because the angles on the trees were tricky for me to visualise I drafted a foundation piecing template (and copied it several times) and foundation pieced the sky to the trees and then the trunk assemblies onto the bottom to finish.

I added scraps of wadding and cut backing from an old sheet and then free-motion quilted the trees to make them a bit more interesting.  I used white thread throughout to give the effect of snow and all the trees are outlined and have wavy lines in the snow.  The sky portions of each tree were quilted differently to try out various machine quilting patterns - most of the designs came from the Free Motion Machine Quilting Project) with a couple that I made up as I went along.

The trees are bound with a 1.5" straight-cut folded binding which I machined to the front and hand stitched to the back

I bought a pack of blank cards & envelopes from Paperchase and used a craft knife to cut slots 1" in from each corner and then tucked the corners through to hold the trees to the cards.

Dad@60 - Construction

This is a more detailled post explaining how I made my Dad@60 quilt.

I started off with this photograph from our holiday to Majorca which, whilst compositionally appalling, had the distinct advantage of being recent and showing dad looking happy and not eating or pulling a silly face!

I started by cropping it down to remove everything except dad.

And then I fired up Inkscape and started to build up my image.  Because I wanted to make this with fabric I didn't outline the features, instead I used blocks of colour to show the shadowed regions and let the features emerge from the white space.  I'd never done this sort of work before so it took me about 4 hours to get an image I was happy with!  The entire image was built using the Bezier Curve/Line tool and the node editor working with a background layer for the photograph and a foreground layer for the picture I was building. It took me several iterations (see below!) to get a "Dad" I was happy with.  Whilst I drew the image entirely in Inkscape I also loaded it up in GIMP where I used the Colour "Threshold" and "Posterise" tools to help me work out where the shadows should go.

1: Jagged Dad

2: Dad-missing-half-his-face

3: Clearer-but-wrongly-lit-dad

4: Final Dad

After I'd got an image I liked I printed him out on A4 paper and started to cut out all the little pieces. I persevered with it to get an idea of what it would look like but it quickly became apparent that several of the pieces were just too small - if I was struggling to cut the paper then there was no way it would work in fabric.

The solution was two-fold, I made the image twice as large and then simplified the shapes a little - in some places I merged unnecessarily complex parts into larger blocks (for example the left shoulder of the shirt) and in others I just simplified the curves so there weren't so many complex cuts needed.

To transfer the image onto fabric I printed it out onto four A4 sheets of freezer paper and cut roughly around the shapes.  I broke the shapes down to make it easier to cut from the fabric and to avoid the dead space that would otherwise exist in the forehead region.  After I had broken the image into pieces I ironed the freezer paper onto the right side of my black fabric, at this point if I had some I would also have ironed fusible web onto the wrong side of the black fabric to make construction easier later on.  Note that whilst I printed all my shapes filled with black it would be far more intelligent to un-fill the shape and just print the outline! The next step was to carefully cut out the fabric pieces to exactly match the freezer paper templates attached to them.  I left the freezer paper on for as long as possible to help stop the fabric fraying.  

I made a quilt sandwich using a fat quarter of background fabric (Checks by Sandy Gervais for Moda from the Merry & Bright collection) with wadding (needle punched cotton of some sort) and backing (part of a cheap duvet set) held together with 505 spray and carefully arranged all the pieces using a small printout of my image as a guide to get everything in the right place.  If I had been clever and just printed the outlines I would have numbered all the pieces so I didn't have to puzzle out how they fitted back together!

At this point if I had used fusible web I would just have ironed everything in place, Since I didn't have any I lifted each piece in turn, sprayed the back with 505 spray and stuck it back into position.  

I didn't take any pictures of the sewing (oops) but I started at the bottom left, carefully removed the freezer paper from the first piece (without detaching the fabric from the backing!) and then used free-motion appliqué to sew it down securely.  I repeated this process to secure all the pieces - it was a little fiddly in places but I think it was actually easier than free motion quilting; black thread on black fabric is very forgiving of the occasional wobble.

Once all the pieces were stitched down I measured from the outside of each shoulder to determine the width of the piece (16 inches) and then picked a height which gave the right amount of space above his head (18 inches).  All that remained was to square the quilt up and bind it.

  I added Fast Finish Triangles on the back (a technique from Terry Chilko) and a little label to commemorate the event!

 At the top you can see a dowel which is tucked into the two corner triangles, the quilt is hung by resting the dowel on a nail or screw in the wall

I didn't really go into the detail of how to make the black and white image from a photograph because I don't feel confident explaining something I've only done once!  I found these tutorials / images useful:

Tutorial - how to draw a vector image (car)

Tutorial - using photshop to make a vector portrait from an image (I didn't actually make mine this way but I found it useful for getting the idea of how shadows work!)

Image - Hendricks Vector (a very nice black & white Jimmy Hendricks portrait)

Photoshop and Illustrator appear to be the tools of choice for this sort of work (and the ones used in all the tutorials I could find) but they are pretty expensive; GIMP and Inkscape are free and do pretty much the same job so I used them instead!

Dad@60

I made this quilt for Dad's 60th Birthday and I couldn't be happier with it.  It's the first time I've ever made any thing like this and amazingly the entire process went smoothly from start to finish.

Whilst I have always admired the art quilts I've seen online and at shows, this quilt was particularly inspired by the work of Luke Haynes, an American quilt artist who makes some stunning contemporary quilts.  I've wanted to make a more "arty" quilt for a quite a while now but always felt hampered by my extreme lack of artistic talent (I'm awful at drawing etc), but the other day Rob was doing some illustrating on the computer and he showed me how he was using different image layers to trace the outlines of his drawing from a photograph.  It looked like something I might be able to do and it turns out it is!

I'll keep this post fairly short but I have put together a (fairly) complete description of how I made the quilt here.

Not new, but newly displayed

I took advantage of the Easter break to tidy up my study (again!) and decided it was high-time I did something about my quilt pile.  I have some quilts I made years ago which I love but have never really had a use for and so I have finally hung them on the walls.

 I'm not very confident about sticking nails in my walls as they seem rather flimsy so I have taken a different approach - it's perhaps not the most aesthetically pleasing but pins and framing tape are a wonderfully quick way to hang a quilt!  

This one was an intermediate patchwork class which introduced lots of different techniques but also made a quilt that wasn't really the right size for anything!

And this is my first "proper" quilt which I used to have on my bed at university and which I absolutely love but it doesn't fit on a double bed and I can't bring myself to use it as a sofa quilt (as it would inevitably have drinks and food spilled all over it).  The picture is a bit rubbish but it really does look great on the wall and the red is lovely and bright (and the quilting is in metallic silver thread which catches the light beautifully!)

Finally, I'm using my log cabin cats as a cover for my treadle (which doubles as a table when it's not in use!)

Scrappy Zappy Do

A somewhat belated post introducing my birthday project - this year we went to Jennie Rayment's Scrappy Zappy Do workshop and made some gorgeous wall hangings. The rolled edges of the segments reminded me of autumn leaves curling on the ground so I picked autumnal colours and made this little beauty 

Chris' Monster

My third foray into the world of the Closest Monster led to my discovery of this little chap who was hiding within an old pair of brown cords.  He is modelled after Lurwin Obsgarde and is a practical sort of chap who has a little "backpack" that he takes every where with him

Mixy & Maxi The Muddled-Up Twins

Meet my two newest monsters, Mixy & Maxi the muddled-up twins.  This troublesome pair are a little bit scatter-brained, in fact the only thing that they never seem to lose is each other.  They are always getting mixed up in one conundrum or another but at heart they are simple lasses, they like nothing better than to settle down together and get crafting - their favourite activities include playing with cupcakes and baking kittens.  When evening falls and the night draws in they like nothing better than to settle down together for a nice bedtime story.

They have been hiding ever so patiently since the beginning of January, waiting for their chance to leap out and suprise my sister for her birthday- I hope you like them Nicky!

Amish Quilts

I went along to my first meeting of the Southampton Quilters last Thursday and they had a speaker, Diane Taylor, who came to talk about the Amish.  The talk was interesting, although not very quilt-focused, and it made me interested to learn more about their quilts.

The first thing I've learnt from looking on the internet is that they are very popular - finding modern Amish quilts made to appeal to "English" people is a lot easier than finding examples of historic Amish quilts.

I have decided that I would like to make a small Amish-inspired quilt so I have been looking for more traditional designs which led me to the museum sites I have listed below, all of which have pictures of beautiful Amish quilts:

• http://www.quiltsamish.com/photographies.html
• http://www.pbase.com/brownsf/amish_quilts
• http://www.museum.state.il.us/ismdepts/art/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=29
• http://www.pbase.com/brownsf/amish_quilts_and_modern_art 
• http://206.204.3.133/dir_nii/nii_esprit.html
• http://www.indianamuseum.org/museumcollections/info.php?s=amish+quilt&type=all&t=objects
• http://www.kenygalleries.com/featuredexh_Pierce%20and%20Quilts.html

Development of Amish Quilting

Amish quilting started around the 1870's and whilst few quilts survive from this period the very first quilts are thought to have typically been whole-cloth quilts or had very simply pieced quilts with large blocks of muted colours - for example the centre diamond pattern appears quite frequently.  Up until the 1920's quilts were no larger than 82" square.

As Amish quilting developed simple geometric designs started to emerge - typical early Amish quilt designs include Bars and Sunshine & Shadows.  Other popular designs include Log cabin, Roman Stripe and Tumbling Boxes and star based designs.

Star based patterns were popular.

Amish quilters were not as isolated from "English" society as many may think and their designs tended to be drawn from "English" quilts although often they would simplify patterns down to make them less ostentatious and commonly Amish quilters would use larger blocks with less pieces than "English" quilts.  This webpage has an interesting comparison of Amish and English quilts from the collection of the Illinois State museum showcasing similarities and differences between the styles of quilting.

Amish quilt designs have tended to lag behind "English" quilting - one possible explanation for this is given by Eve Wheatcroft Granick, author of The Amish Quilt, who writes that "the inherently conservative nature of Amish culture permits change only in relationship to the larger outside society.  What has been discarded by other American women as being out of fashion is then acceptable for possible adaptation in the Amish community" 

Applique does not tend to feature in Amish quilts, most probably because of the prohibition about creating representational images which forms part of the Amish culture.  For the same reason quilts do not show people or places but restrict themselves to geometric patterns.

Colours and Fabrics
Historically Amish quilts were made with woollen fabrics with pieced designs often being made from dressmaking remnants, though rarely from old clothing as this was simply too worn to be of use.  Modern Amish quilts are often made of cotton but Amish quilters rarely use silks and the like.

 Fabrics are solid, not patterned, and colours tend to be muted and from the cool side of the colour spectrum - deep blues, greens, purples and reds are common colours and yellow and orange are rarely seen. 

Quilting

Amish quilting is done by hand and Amish quilters are famed for their tiny stitches - up to 12 stitches per inch! The entire top of the quilt tends to be very densely quilted, to secure the layers of the quilt through the woollen batting, and quilting patterns are traditionally either geometric (grids and straight lines) or inspired by nature (feathers, flowers, grapevines).

Black Cats

I started this quilt in 2003 after a foundation piecing class.  The original aim was to make a king sized bed quilt out of it but after a while I got incredibly bored of making tiny little log cabin blocks so I called a halt at 144 six years later in December 2009... apparently I then stuck it in a cupboard and left it alone for 2 years, and I can't really believe it was there for so long, but I have finally gotten around to putting them together.  And I really rather like it.  It is 84cm square (because for some reason my foundation piecing paper was in 1cm grid rather than something nice and imperial) and has 1872 pieces in it.  The focus fabric consists entirely of cat fabric :D

Introducing Trevor

This is Trevor and he is a monster.  Trevor is the nephew of Maureen from Closet Monsters; whilst Maureen spent her youth travelling the world and seeking out adventure Trevor is a more down to earth sort of guy.  He likes long walks in the countryside, a warm place by the fire and a quiet beer with a few mates.  He works as a handy man, odd job man and fixer-of-broken-things.  He just loves to pull things apart and find out how they work and then put them back together again; he's pretty good at it too which is fortunate because for some reason whenever Trevor's around things have a habit of "breaking themselves"... in fairness though who expects a monster to be careful?

A Quilt for Nana

Being the crazy person that I am, and having discovered that I could make quilts quite quickly when I put my mind to it, I decided that making one quilt in time for Christmas wasn't good enough - I clearly needed to make two so that Nana could have one to complement Grandad's!

The design from this quilt started with the few (small) scraps of fabric left over from the Jelly Roll I used for Grandad's quilt; with some careful napkin-math I worked out that I could just get 90 2 1/2" squares out of the remnants of the jelly roll so I went searching for a quilt pattern that was mostly background!  The Single Irish Chain seemed to fit the bill nicely and a bit of scribbling showed me that I could get a fairly nice sized lap quilt with the fabric I had.  I added in some Makower Dimples from my stash for the background and eeked a skinny border out of the last of the yardage and came up with the quilt above for Nana.

Because there is so much background in this quilt I needed to do quite a bit more quilting to keep it interesting - I started off by quilting diagonal lines to pick out the criss-cross pattern of the patchwork and then added in some free motion quilting to fill the background squares.  This was a bit of a leap for me as the most free motion I'd done before hand was simple loops and stars all over the top of a quilt and the notion of  filling a clearly defined space was a little daunting.  I turned to The Free Motion Quilting Project for inspiration and decided to use Leah's Feathered Hearts design (although I changed it very slightly by making the central hearts into teardrops)

I watched the how-to video a few times and did a little sample square, then I sat down, had a cup of tea and asked mum what she thought of it... because I very nearly gave up the idea when I saw how many mistakes I had made!  Fortunately she convinced me that it was the overall effect we were aiming at and so I plunged ahead and tackled the quilt; whilst the individual lines are not perfect the effect on the quilt as a whole is pretty stunning and I will definitely be trying to use more design-oriented quilting in the future.

So, in the space of 7 days I made two quilts from start to finish, improved my free motion quilting confidence no end and made Rob's Nana a very happy lady....  I love Christmas!

A Quilt for Grandad

This is a quilt which I made for Rob's grandad.  We wanted to give him something nice for Christmas as unfortunately it looks like this may be his last and a quilt seemed to fit the bill perfectly - something made with love to add a splash of colour and hopefully keep him warm this winter.

I needed to make the quilt quickly so I dug out my copy of Jelly Roll Quilts and decided to use the Pandora's Box pattern.  I used a jelly roll of Moda's Little Gatherings line and bordered and bound it with yardage of one of the same fabrics.  The backing is a re-purposed duvet cover from Matalan (which I forget to photograph).  Because the quilt is quite large and geometric I kept the quilting very simple and quilted in the ditch between each of the blocks in invisible thread.  The borders are simply filled with parallel lines 1" apart.

Overall I'm very pleased with how this worked out, it is definitely the fastest quilt I have ever made taking just a single weekend from cutting to completion, and most importantly Nana liked it very much.