Fire & Ice Update

I had a very productive weekend and decided to make a start on my UFO's.  I decided to start with one of the earlier ones and dragged Fire & Ice out of the cupboard.  2 hours later I had finished assembling the quilt top and I can't believe it's taken me this long to get around to it! It looks a bit wavy because all the pieces are paper-backed and it got a bit scrunched up in the cupboard but I'm confident that once the papers are off it will lay flat!

I started by trimming all the blocks down and then assembled them into 4-block squares, then into three long rows and finally into one big quilt.  The next task is to remove all the papers from the back.  There are an awful lot of tiny little pieces and, to make it even more fun, most of them are printer paper stuck on with pritt-stick so its going to take a while to clear down.  Still, it's good telly-watching activity so I'm fairly hopeful that this will get done shortly - I managed to get about a third of it cleared off on Sunday night so I should get there before too long... then I just have to decide how to quilt this Beauty.

Cheating FTW!

I am finally making some progress on my Fire & Ice Quilt; I decided that I'm not going to start anything new until I clear out at least some of my UFO's and since I really want to start playing with some arty samplers this is quite an incentive!

I've tried to get on and add the centres to this quilt a few times with no sucess and recently I even tried curved piecing to see if that was more interesting (which it was until I had to unpick it all!) and finally I decided that it absolutely had to get done and I really wasn't to bothered about the authenticity of my technique. So, bye bye to burnt fingers, freezer paper and irons and hello to printed templates and pritstick. I am quite simply sticking my fabric to my paper cut outs and then gluing the curved edges over too - takes about 1min/piece and I can do it in front of the telly; I'm getting beautifully curved edges, my sewing machine loves me and I'm actually enjoying this quilt at last! When the whole thing is done it is going to sit in a big tub of water until the glue dissolves (yes, it definately is water soluble!) and then go through the wash, problem solved.

Proof: I honestly did make some progess on this beastie!

One Step Closer

I just got back from Brecon yesterday and was in a doing-things mood. The original plan when I took an extra day off work was to do all the housework and get the holiday stuff squared away - somehow it accidentally turned into a doing-some-patchwork day instead!

I have finally (almost a year to the day) finished the arcs for my New York Beauty. 48 beautifully pieced foudation arcs in shades of red and blue now lie on the ironing board waiting to be completed with inner and outer blocking. I set the sewing machine up in front of the telly, wacked the volume up high and 5 hours of re-runs later finally finished the last 12 arcs. I think i'm giving the foundation piecing a break for a while - the results are definately cool but the fact that I had to trim after every single piece really got to me - very hard to build up a rhythm. Still, finished now.

I also cut all the centres and outers for the blocks so now it's just a case of ironing the freezer paper, tacking the curves and overstitching them to the arcs.... I still love the look of the New York Beauty but all the funny-sewing means that I'm unlikely to make another and I have point-blank refused to even contemplate piecing the pointy border... I'll find some other way to finish it; anything but more foundation pieced spikes!


Next stupidly ambitions project to finish is the 420+ foundation pieced log cabin blocks for my around the world quilt. I am quite possibly mad but I'm a good couple of hundred into it now so it will definately get finished... eventually!

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.

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