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.

Quietly busy...

While things have been a bit quiet around here lately, it's because things have been busy elsewhere in my life. But that doesn't mean I haven't been working on things. In particular I have been slowly working on a long forgotten work in progress, a quilt that has been sat on the back of my couch for about 2 years waiting for the last third or so if hand quilting to be finished.

I'm getting close to finishing now, and will hopefully soon be able to go and pick out some binding...

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!

Sewing Lessons - part 4

Misaya came over on the weekend to work on her quilt some more. The next step was hand stitching the binding onto the back of the quilt.

I had some quilt binding to sew down too, so we sat on the couch and watched Rattatouille while stitching the binding.



Look at how neat her stitching is. And can you see the spot where the binding is pieced - she had a go at matching the stripes and did pretty well for a first try!

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!

Sewing Lessons - part 3

The other evening Misaya came over for another sewing date to work on her quilt.

She promptly got to work finishing off her lines of quilting, which were triumphantly completed very quickly

Then onto the scary stage of trimming the quilt top...

... ready to attach the binding...

...including learning how to do mitered corners.

Now all the machine sewing is done - just a bit of hand sewing left and it'll be finished!

Sewing Lessons - part 2

Late last week Misaya came over for the evening and we had our second session of teaching her how to sew. After triumphantly completing her quilt top last time, this second session was devoted to basting and starting the quilting.

After a discussion of the merits of different basting methods we set to work pin basting her quit (mainly chosen due to the tools available at the time rather than anything else!). We also discussed quilting designs and settled on straight lines approx 1/4" away from each seam line, so when basting we tried to make sure that all the pins were about an inch away from the seam lines so that she wouldn't have to remove them as she quilted.

We seriously over pinned (using nearly all my pins, which should be enough for a double sized quilt!), but better to be safe than sorry eh!

Then it was onto the quilting. We had decided the quilting should be about 1/4" away from the seamlines as it would be much more forgiving to a slight wiggle than trying to stitch in the ditch (ie along the seamline).

Our evening was interrupted by a trip to the pub for some goodbye drinks for a dear friend and colleague, so she didn't get as much done as we would have liked, but she did get about 1/3 of the quilting done before heading home.

Hot Water Bottle Cover

Another of my Easter weekend projects was to make a hot water bottle cover. My old one was made with some left over flanelette from making PJs and wasn't really quite thick enough and was also starting to look a bit shabby. So, I used some of the scraps left from my genome quilt to make a coordinating hot water bottle cover:



Blues and greens on one side, and whites on the other, I foundation pieced strips until they covered the desired shape/size.



I then quilted down the lines with a free motion wiggle (white thread on the white side, green/blue varigated thread on the coloured side)




And lastly bound the edges with some bias binding to hold the two sides together.

It's not really been cold enough yet to use it, but I couldn't resist trying it out last week, It's definitely perfect for the job!