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.