Laura's Quilt - 4 - Binding and Finished

This is the 4th and last post about the quilt I made for my friend Laura as a wedding present. I've already talked about the inspiration and fabric, design and layout, and piecing and quilting, so the only step left is the binding!



For binding I decided to use scraps of all the fabrics in the quilt top (I'd actually been planning it from the beginning and cut the 2.5" strips at the same time as all the squares).



I really love how the scrappy binding looks on the quilt, particularly as the quilt top has a scrappy look itself.





Once the binding was done (and a label sewn on the back, which I've chosen not to blog about) the quilt was ready to pack to take with me to England!



So here's the finished thing, first a pic taken in my room that shows off the fabrics really well....



And some taken in it's new home:







As I've already said, I'm incredibly happy with how the quilt has turned out. It was really important to me to make a quilt I was happy with and I think I've succeeded in that with this one. Hopefully Laura and Simon are as happy with it as I am. And more importantly, I wish them all my love and hope that they are as happy in their marriage as I am with this quilt :)

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!

Laura's Quilt - 2- Design & Layout

This is the second post about the quilt that I made as a wedding present for my friend Laura. Last time I talked about the quilts that I used as inspiration, and the fabric that I chose. The from the last post that provided the most inspiration was this one:

I was particularly struck by the above pictured quilt so decided to use it as inspiration for mine, but didn't want to try and do a straight copy. Although I like the negative space, I wanted to have some more colour than this one. I actually worked out my design the old fashioned way with a piece of graph paper and a pencil, however as I'm writing this post in England and my pieces of paper are in Australia I can't show them to you. I can describe my design process though (hoping I remember it correctly). First I thought about what the above design really is when broken down into squares

But from that I estimated that the squares are smaller than the size I'd like so modified it slightly but still pretty similar

But this is where I decided to start adding in some more colour to the design, so I added in another row of squares

But I didn't really like how the sizes reduced in such an ordered way. So I tried something else

But this option was even worse! It looked like two strips of filmstrip, and that definitely wasn't the look I was going for!! Since I was working on this at a Sit and Sew Day I was lucky enough to get input from others, and my final design was actually entirely due to Sally, who suggested the slight alteration to one of my previous designs

Having settled on my design I started cutting

4.5" squares for the larger squares, and 2.5" squares for the smaller ones, to give finished sizes of 4" and 2" respectively. By the end of the day I was able to lay out some of the squares and get a preview of what my design was going to look like

The last stage of choosing the design was working out the layout of all the fabrics within my design. To do this I laid them all out on the floor in my chosen design, swapping the fabrics around until I thought was happy with the balance

But after taking photos of my layout I realised that one of my green fabrics just wasn't working, it was too dark. It's easier to see in the below photo that I've converted to black and white

And finally here is my final design and layout of the fabrics within it:



What do you think of the design and layout that I chose? I'm really happy with it, I love it! In the next post I'll talk about the piecing and quilting of the quilt.

Laura's Quilt - 1- Inspiration & Fabrics

One of the reasons that I've come over to England this July is for the wedding of one of my best friends, Laura. As a wedding pressie for her and her husband-to-be I made them a quilt. This is actually the secret project I mentioned here back in January. Now that I have given them the quilt I can finally share the quilt and the progress of making it. I actually quite enjoy sharing the progress of making quilts, so even though the quilt is finished and with its new owners I'm going to tease you with it a bit longer and post a short series of posts about the creation of this quilt.

1. FQ Quilt Along_5, 2. IMG_3304 (800x533), 3. Blue Bento, 4. Habitat Modern Quilt Challenge

The creation of the quilt started right back last November when I asked Laura for some input on colours and styles that she liked. While I kept the final quilt itself a secret, I wanted some guidance with what she did and didn't like to increase the chance of making something she(/they) would like. So, as a starting point I asked her to take a look at quilts I'd added on pinterest and marked as a favourite on flickr and tell me which ones she liked. Above and below are many of the quilts that she said she liked, from which I got the inspiration for the quilt I ended up making.

1. Mod Times Quilt - finished!, 2. innocent crush kaleidoscope quilt, 3. HST Sheet Quilt , 4. Pinwheel Quilt

 She also told me that her favourite colour was purple, and her husband-to-be's favourite colour was green, so I enthusiastically chose that colour scheme. A trip to spotlight and I managed to find some fabric in the exact colour scheme I was imagining:

Once I had those two, I then hunted out other fabrics to match. It turned out to be harder than I thought, I hadn't chosen 'fashionable' colours - all the purples were too pink and all the greens too yellow for what I wanted. I managed to find some in bricks and mortar stores in Melbourne and Perth, but most of them came from the internet. This is the selection I ended up with:

What would you make from the above inspiration and the fabrics I bought? I'll be back in my next post with the next stage of the process and you'll find out what I decided on.

Sleeping & Stitching

Despite spending a large amount of this weekend sleeping, it has been a productive one (not that sleeping is bad, sleeping is definitely good!). In addition to cleaning and vacuuming my bedroom, the living room and corridor I did some sewing yesterday trying to fashion a top out of the leftovers from my most recent pyjama bottoms (which was going really well, I'd managed to squeeze all the pieces I needed onto the fabric... and then I cut one of the pieces backwards, causing a slight change in plan, but more about that another time.

Today I set up my sewing machine on the coffee table, put on some classic chick flicks (Love Actually, Bridget Jones' Diary and Bridget Jones' Diary 2) and approached the piecing of my quilt in a slightly different way.

The other day I reorganised my pieces to be in pinned piles separated by sheets of paper in a lunchbox, as suggested here by Aneela over at comfortstiching. I can't believe I hadn't thought to do it before, and it's made the piecing SO much easier to keep track of everything.

Anyway, I decided to stitch all of the white strips onto my pieces (see pic below), and next time I'll cut them all, then iron them all, then stitch it all together. The fact that doing it row by row was taking me almost an hour a row was getting me down, and this way doesn't feel as long as I'm doing so many strips at once! The logic might not work, but that's how it seems.

Even though my sewing was marginally interrupted by homemade pizza and then an excursion for churros by the end of the evening I have finished sewing the white stripes onto all my remaining strips, oh and re-fallen in love with Colin Firth (in all three films!). Definitely a productive time!

Below is a picture of the 8 strips I've sewn together so far, I'm still on the fence about whether I like the design I've picked or not. Not that it matters as I'm too far in to change my mind now! My favourite part of the quilt (and my last one) is that all the fabric has a memory attached to it, so it's nice to look through it and remember the different projects each one was a left over from.


In other news, I tried on my JJ with my Laura dress this weekend, and if I'm not greatly mistaken I think they go together very well. I've only actually worn the Laura once, as the fabric I picked was a bit heavy, and that combined with the shape (and possibly length) of the skirt makes me feel all frumpy. However, with the JJ it is a bit better, so while we're having this cold snap I may whip out this outfit.