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.

A quilt for baby-squirrel

This is another seriously overdue blog post, as I made this quilt about 9 months ago, eek! Time flies when you're being slack.

This quilt was a gift that I made for Sarah and her newest bub.

While that seems nice and selfless, I was a great excuse for me to use the woodland animal (plus blue giraffe??) fabric I have used as a feature, which has been in my stash for aages. I had seen the fabric at a quilt show and couldn't resist buying it because it's so cute, even though I had no plans for it whatsoever (unusal for me).

I then selected other fabrics from my stash that coordinated with the animals for the rest of the quilt top. To finish off the quilt I bought coordinating backing and binding.

To design the quilt I sketched up the design on squared paper, carefully mazximising the use of the woodland fabric, and also the solid orange I'd decided to use, which with some very careful cutting I used almost every scrap of (hence needing to buy different fabric for binding).

I also used this quilt as a way to have a bit of a practice with free motion quilting before embarking on a bigger (also as yet unblogged) project, just to make sure my free motion skills weren't completely rusty.



And I'll leave you with some lovely pics of the tiny recipient on the quilt (she's not this tiny anymore!)...

Eva Dress... or the day I accidentally made a maxi dress.

Back in May Oanh posted on her instagram about an Eva dress that she had made, but didn't really like because it was too short for her. She very generously let me try on the dress and even more generously gifted it to me when I (surprisingly) fit into it (Thanks Oanh!). Ever since then I have called it the dress that Oanh made me. It's also a little short on me too, but that's nothing a pair of opaque tights doesn't fix, and so this dress got a fair bit of wear over the winter. It also works well with a long sleeved black shirt under it too.

Due to enjoying the dress so much I decided to make another version, adding a little bit of length, using some (I think Viscose) jersey that I got in the swap in London last year.

So, after trying on Oanh's dress I decided to add 1" of length to the bodice and about 2-3" of length to the skirt, which in theory would add the right amount of length for the dress to hit at knee length.

However, I forgot one vital thing with respect to knits; different knits do not behave the same as each other! In particular, the knit I was using is a 4-way stretch, whereas the knit that Oanh had used was a 2-way stretch...

I stitched up the dress, carefully following the (confusing at times) instructions and then tried it on and was incredibly disappointed to discover that the dress was practically at my ankles! Not good!

The dress was relegated to the naughty corner for a while until I felt I had the motivation to take it apart and fix it (as I still wanted this dress). Before taking it apart I tried it on again and worked out that I wanted to remove 2-2.5" of length from the bodice, so that's where I started. The dress was fairly large all over so I just cut off the overlocked seam allowances, not worrying that the dress would therefore be about 1cm smaller on all seams.

While reconstructing it I also took the opportunity to fix up my botched job of the back neckline. Rather than the confusing binding method that the pattern suggested I used clear elastic in much the same method that is recommended for the Maria Denmark day2night top.

I stitched the dress back together and tried it on again... it was better but still needed a heap removed from the length of the skirt, where I hacked off 4-5" of length. Now I was starting to get somewhere!

One last alteration that I made was to take in the fullness in the back bodice; I did this by adding a seam up the centre back that took out the fullness where the pleat was in the bodice back, but keeping the pleat in the skirt. Thankfully with the solid fabric the seam isn't too obvious.

I'm not completely sold on the pleat in the back. I think there are too many components going on in this dress with the cowl, the drape and also the back pleat. I think it would be nicer with just a standard a-line skirt in the back.

I do particularly like the draping on the front, it add something different from anything else I've seen around. Although my alterations have further emphasised the strange extra pull-lines coming from the edges of the neckline, is that something I should worry about for any future versions?

 

In these pictures I'm trying out the no-hemming philosophy with knit dresses... and I have to say I'm not completely sold. I've worn it once like this and the lack of hem feels makes the dress feel unfinished and like it's missing something. I will try it once more, but at the moment I'm erring towards hemming it.

Overall I'm pretty happy with how this dress turned out in the end, and have thoughts of making at least one more in a gorgeous floral viscose knit that Kathleen ridiculously generously donated at social sewing last month and I was lucky enough to grab.

A quilt for baby Riley

I recently made a quilt for my good friend Simon and his 1 year old son Riley.

The criteria for selecting the fabrics and design were that the quilt needed to:
a) feature blue heavily
b) be awesome

So, with some help from the boy, I selected the above bundle of fabrics at GJs. After some playing around we settled on this fairly simple design, in order to let the fabrics shine:

And then, guess what, one of the fabrics does shine! ...well glow... it turns out the Star Wars fabric is glow in the dark!

  

If I hadn't been pressing it in the evening and then turned the lights off we might not have found out; so check your stash for any secretly glow in the dark fabric guys!

It turned out that one of the fabrics I picked was designed by "Riley Blake", so I had a nice convenient name tag on the selvedge of that fabric!

 

I did different quilting in each of the sections, including loop-de-loops in the red section to mirror the print.

And after binding in red... a fantastic new quilt!!

 

Here it is with a happy dad after being gifted:

And doesn't Riley look cosy sleeping underneath it...

And it's plenty big enough for him to grow into...

Yay for a successful quilt!

Ruth's Quilt - Design Process

The other day when I showed you the quilt that I made for Ruth and Jon I promised to talk about the process I went through designing the quilt. With the quilts that I've made, I've rarely used a pattern, or when I have I've usually tweaked it for my requirements.

With this quilt I had some vague ideas of what I wanted to include but needed to decide how the whole thing would fit together. I knew I wanted it to be a 'medallion' style quilt (with successive borders as you go out from the centre), and I wanted to include dresdens, as I thought they would fit well with the style of fabrics I'd chosen. Other than that I wasn't sure.

I started by grabbing some paper, a pencil and some coloured pencils and started sketching out ideas. The first idea that I came up with that I was vaguely happy with is shown below. It heavily features the dresden plates, including some going around the outside of one of the inner borders.

I wasn't completely happy with the composition of this design though (it didn't feel quite right on the required rectangle for the quilt to go on a bed), and somebody on Twitter (Lizzy I think) suggested putting one of the borders on point:

Sketching up this idea it came together quite quickly. Adding a diamond shaped border around a larger central dresden along with some other rectangular borders. I liked the original large striped border for the outer border as I really liked that (with the intent that these stripes will be the parts that hang down the sides of the bed) so planned on keeping it, so just redesigned inside of that border.

However I kept coming up with ideas for what could go in those triangles around the diamond border. So I sketched out my various ideas on little cut out pieces of paper the size of that triangle, and in the end decided that of all the options I preferred the smaller dresdens as full circles centred (as much as is possible in the shape) in the triangle.

 

But for some reason (that I don't understand now) I was still torn between the two overall designs. After I mentioned this to Darren and he helped me out hugely by mocking up the designs on to little beds. I sent him through pictures of my sketches and very quickly thereafter I received these images back:

    

The instant that I saw those images I knew that I preferred the one with the inner diamond border, hands down, no competition. However, I wasn't sure if I liked the smaller dresdens anymore, but knew that as they would be appliquéd on I could decide that later on in the construction process.

 

Now I had my overall design I needed to work out the actual dimensions, and therefore the sizes of the pieces to cut out, and then an order of construction. As I liked the overall proportions from my sketch, I measured up the sketch, then multiplied up the dimensions based on how big I wanted the quilt to be; the width of everything except the outer border should be about the same as the width of the bed, the total height minus one of the outer borders should be the length of the bed (so the top border covers the pillows rather than goes over the edge of the bed like the other three).

Working inwards and dividing/multiplying I worked out how big each of the borders should be, and then individually worked out how big the separate pieces should be. Going into detail of how I did that is a bit complex on here, but once I had the vague measurements I started on the construction. I started with the large white diamond and also the large central dresden. Then I constructed each border as I got to it.

I didn't remember to take a photo of the quilt in it's new home, but above is a (slightly crappy) pic of the quilt top on my bed to show the scale on a bed. However, it looks better on the real bed as UK beds are slightly different sizes to Australian ones, and my bed is lower than where it actually lives.