A quilt for Neal and Helena

Today I am finally sharing a very special quilt. This is the project I alluded to as my 5th hit in my hits of 2014 post. It is now with its intended recipients so I can blog about it all I like. This is a very special quilt, and a true collaboration between myself and my Gran.

My cousin Neal got married to his lovely wife Helena in November of 2013. The wedding was on the beach on Stradbroke Island in Queensland, and it was absolutely beautiful (see above), a really lovely day to be part of. If I'm remembering correctly they had requested/suggested a quilt as a wedding gift from my Gran. Granny and I decided that I could help with the quilt, so we started working on it when she was visiting Victoria for the first few months of last year.

Granny wanted to make a medallion quilt design, so we sat down with some paper, a ruler and pencil and experimented with a few designs. I had learnt with the previous the medallion style quilt I've made that it's a lot easier to design the quilt if you have a base unit of measure that each border is a multiple of. We tried a few variations and different borders and such, and eventually settled on the design you can see in the photos, involving quarter square triangles, squares, flying geese, applique and plain fabric borders.

Granny knew she wanted to include turquoise as one of the main colours (the main colour chosen at the wedding, for the decorations, bridesmaid's dresses and groomsmen's ties), and also wanted it to go well in their bedroom, which has a royal blue wall and a lovely painting on the wall with some orange in it (which isn't the room pictured here). From here we had our main colour scheme so went hunting for fabric.

All the fabric was bought at GJs Discount Fabrics, and we tried to pick a range of colours, from pale to bright to dark, and a range of print sizes, from large prints to small prints to solid colours. I particularly like the addition of the orange with the blue and turquoise, I think it's made for a really fresh looking quilt.

One of the fabrics we chose had a larger floral motif, that Granny decided to applique onto the large turquoise border, along with some bias strips and similarly cut out leaves.

Granny did the majority of the piecing of the quilt, although I helped with a little bit of it and with some of the cutting. For the quarter square triangles in the middle we used this method and for the flying geese we used this method.

Once the piecing was finished, I was in charge of quilting, and I ended up doing a combination of free motion quilting and straight line quilting, varying the quilting design to suit each border. We discussed a few different options, and quickly settled on stippling on the quarter square triangles in the centre and the border of squares. It took a little more thought for the other sections.

Darren made the fantastic suggestion of cross-hatching the background of the applique border, so I stitched all the way around the edge of the applique, and then marked the cross hatch lines at 1" intervals, first doing one direction then the other. There was quite a bit of quilt manhandling required to do the cross hatching, as I went back and forth along the lines but I am thrilled with the outcome so glad to have bothered. Having spent my time basting properly and using my walking foot, I didn't have any issues with puckering of the fabric when I was doing the second pass of the crosshatching, which I had been a little concerned about.

In the end, after trying a few different options (including in this baby quilt) I decided to just stitch in the ditch of the flying geese. I just went back and forth in a zig-zag along each side of the geese to reduce the rotation required of the quilt.

For the larger blue outer border I had decided very early on that I would just do concentric squares around the border, and when deciding how far apart to do them I decided to make them progressively further apart as they reached the edge of the quilt.

The quilt is finished with some orange binding, and it has a turquoise backing (from the backing section at GJs so we didn't have to piece the back, hurrah!)

A big project, and I'm absolutely thrilled with how it turned out. I was secretly hoping that Neal and Helena wouldn't like the quilt and I'd be able to claim it. Sadly that wasn't the case, so it has a happy new home with them.

DUDQS3 - Quilt Recieved!

I shared with you the quilt I made for the DUDQS3 last week, but today I am very excited to share the quilt that I received.

My quilt was made by the very talented Kelli. Just look at that quilting! Isn't it stunning!! I absolutely love it!

Kelli has left the coloured squares un-quilted and they really pop.

It's going to look beautiful on my wall!!

Thank you so much Kelli, I really do love it!


PS: Are you planning on coming along to the Social Sewing this Saturday (the 27th October)? If so, please let me know!

Laura's Quilt - 3- Piecing & Quilting

This is the third post about the quilt that I made as a wedding present for my friend Laura. Last time I talked about process I went through to choose the design of the quilt. Once I'd chosen the design I pieced the quilt top together, by adding white fabric in between my squares. Here's what it looked like laid out on my bed (before I'd added the white strips to the top and bottom of the quilt as I had to go and buy some more white before I could add them):

After finishing the quilt top I had to start thinking about the back. Laura had a bit of a bunting theme going on with her wedding, it featured on her save the date cards, on the invitation and I knew she had plans for bunting for the wedding itself. Therefore I knew from the beginning that I had to include bunting somehow in the gift. Rather than make it obvious and potentially tacky on the front, I decided to add it to the back; appliquéd onto a solid white back.

Triangles of heat n bond ironed onto the back of the fabric and cut out to make my bunting flags

After spending quite a while fiddling with the flags until I was happy with the layout and fused them on

Then did a small zig-zag around the edges to secure the flag onto the fabric

Now that my top and back were done I could baste and start quilting. I actually tried something different with the basting this time - I used a quilting frame (owned by a friend) to baste the layers together:

It was an interesting experiment to try, but in all honesty I wouldn't use that method again. While it was much much quicker than the normal way of basting, and much more comfortable (no crawling on the floor!), I don't think the quality of the basting was anywhere near as good. Because of the way the quilt was rolled onto the frame, the back of the quilt was around the outside, so it actually pulled the back onto it disproportionately to the front and I actually ran out of backing before the end of the top (problem one), and then when I started quilting it I actually ended up with puckers on the backing (problem two). I also noticed towards the end of the whole process that somehow the top had become wonky, I guess from basting it a bit wonky, which was disappointing (problem three). You can't tell any of these three problems unless you really look for them though.

However, despite those problems I'm still happy with how the quilt turned out, I just wouldn't use that method again. Once I completed the basting, I could start quilting. I actually already shared a sneak peek of the quilting of this quilt. I chose to stipple over the white sections and do a leaf design in the coloured squares...

I really am thrilled about how well the quilting went. It was a bit of a risk trying something new like this on a quilt that I really felt I needed to work. It wouldn't have happened at all if it wasn't for Sally, as my sewing machine was (still) playing up, and she incredibly generously let me use her sewing machine for the quilting. Other than basic functionality of the machine, Sally's machine made the job easier because hers has a 12" throat, whereas mine has a 9" one - those extra 3" make a huge difference!



What do you think? What quilting design would you have chosen? In the next, and last, post about Laura's quilt I will talk about the binding and show of some pics of the finished thing!

Branching out with the FMQ

After completing the quilting of my Concentric Hexagon Quilt with free motion stippling all over, I've become quite comfortable with the design. So, I have decided to branch out a little with the free motion quilting design for the next quilt I'm working on...

I was inspired to try this quilting design by this quilt by Sew Katie Did, and then in case I needed another push Elizabeth Hartman posted a tutorial on how she quilted it.

Now both Elizabeth and Katie call this style an "orange peel" design. However, as I still need a little practice on this, I've decided that mine aren't orange peels, but leaves; as leaves aren't all exactly the same shape and size ;)

PS: photographing white quilting on white fabric is tricky!

Super Stippling Progress

After my Free Motion Practice post the other day I started quilting my concentric hexagons quilt (which really does need a better name, suggestions please?) and I thought I'd share my progress.

Since the weather has been pretty hot here this week I sought sanctuary of the living room, as my room can get very hot in summer and the living room has air con. However, we currently don't have a dining table, so I set myself up in a very unconventional and probably highly un-ergonomic setup using my coffee table.

I used the coffee table, a stool and the couch to support the weight of the quilt so that it wasn't pulling on where I was stitching. Then as always I always do whatever type of quilting I'm doing, I started close to the middle and worked my way out.

Despite the unconventional setup I am pretty happy with how my stitching is working out.

It also looks pretty good on the back (see below). Since the print is quite busy already and the navy bits alerady have some beige lines it actually (surprisingly) sinks into the print quite well and looks alright.

I did maybe 1/4 of the quilt over the course of the evening, which was 3 or 4 bobbins worth of thread I think.



You can see above how much I have done so far. I started up the top, and worked my way around a bit in the middle then moved across to one edge, then back across to the middle then kept kind of wiggling my way out until I reached the corner and then started working across the bottom edge.



I'm planning to take this along to the MMQG Sit and Sew Evening tonight to make some more progress on it.

And just so you don't think that everything always works perfectly, here's some stitching that went wrong:

This happened straight after I re-threaded the machine after the first bobbin ran out. I stitched maybe 6-10" of stippling and noticed that the stitches looked a bit loose. Then when I looked at the back of the quilt I had these terrible loops happening. Not good! So I stopped, unpicked the bad stitches (which thankfully was very easy) and completely rethreaded the machine, which fixed the problem.

So, if you ever end up with funny stitches, the best course of action is to re-thread your machine, as that usually fixes the problem

Free Motion Practice

Today's post is related to yesterdays post about my hexagon quilt. Before jumping in and quilting the queen sized quilt (gulp!) I thought some practice to get my hand back in with Free motion quilting as I haven't done any in a while. So I got a practice sandwich, loaded up my machine with different colours for the top and bobbin thread and went quilting.

I was quite happy with how it turned out. I definitely need to work on keeping my stitch length a bit more even, but I was also focusing on increasing my scale slightly and keeping it consistent, which I think I managed quite well.

Leah Day, of the Free Motion Quilting Project is currently running a free motion quilt along where she is encouraging readers to jump in and just give it a go. She's written some great posts of how to get started, including some really great tips, one of which I used here with great success. In her "playing with scale" post she talks about using a reference to help you with changing the scale of a design. When I've free motion quilted things before I've struggled with scaling up the stippling, and I used Leah's tip of using a touchstone to remind you of your scale - I used the width of my fingers as I could always see it. I aimed for the gaps between the quilting to, on average, be about the width of my finger, which they are, hurrah!

(Leah has also been encouraging readers to show pictures of their stitches, both good and bad, so that's what I've done)

I definitely can improve, in the above pic you can see some examples of what I want to improve on - near the top you can see a massive variation in stitch length, and below left you can see how I need to practice smoothing out my curves sometimes.

Flipping it over and looking at the back it's mostly ok, as shown above...

But occasionally I get some of the top threads coming through to the back. This was alleviated somewhat by increasing the upper tension a tiny bit (and I mean tiny). Again however, Leah has covered this too and has suggested making sure you go slow and steady on the curves - as if you notice it only happens on the tighter corners where i'm not going at a steady speed.

Another thing that Leah recommends is to use the same thread in the top and bottom, which agrees with Michele's comment on my last post. I don't want to have navy thread poking through to my lovely cream negative space, and I don't think the cream thread will look horrific on the back (and besides, it's the back!)

Now to fill up some bobbins and get quilting!!

Stipple, Stipple, Stipple...

After a very lazy Saturday I spent this evening finally doing some more work on my advent calendar; doing the quilting in the sashing.

After practising with pencil and paper I thought I was just about ready to give the real thing a go, so replaced my pencil with my sewing machine and my paper with my advent calendar. starting in one corner and some what randomly wandering over the quilt I've been wiggling, meandering and wavering all over the sashing. There have been a couple of 'oops' moments, a few stitches slipping across from the sashing onto the pockets, but nothing too horrific.

I marginally deviated from the tutorial and decided to do a square of stitching around each pocket so that the integrity of the shape of the wall hanging once the pockets are stuffed doesn't depend entirely on my limited free motion quilting skill.

On reflection my wiggles, jiggles and meanders may be packed a little tighter than they need to be, but for a first try I don't think they're all that bad. So far I've done about two thirds of the wall hanging so I should be able to finish it off tomorrow. Then I only need to decide what to do for binding... oh, and make a second one!

Free Motion Quilting...

I went to the sewing machine shop on Satuday to help a friend buy a machine for her sister (a birthday gift - talk about best sister ever!) and I finally managed to pick up a darning foot for my machine.

Thus, I had a bit of a go at free motion quilting... and boy, it's HARD!!! Below are a couple of images of my attempts, and I definitely need to have some more practice before I let myself loose on anything I actually care about!

My somewhat pathetic attempt at stippling - I need to practice the whole drawing with thread thing, draw wiggly lines on sheets of paper and all that.

Some fake roses, spirals for the roses that aren't too bad, and some leaves, the first of which was TERRIBLE (I bet you can guess which one it is!) but the second and third improved. Also some more utterly pathetic stippling on this one too.