Memory quilt fail

This is a post I wrote in October 2012 and never got around to posting. Better late than never right?

 

 My Mum.

 

Would you like to look at a failed project? I am making a quilt for my nephew. One of the his first idea's was to have a memory quilt to take to boarding school. His Mum (my sis) and I spent quite a while thinking about this idea and planning a quilt. Most of the examples we could find on Pinterest or google images were a bit disappointing, but  eventually, we felt we came up with a design that we thought would look nice.

 

 

Angus with his grandparents.

 

The main thing I was worried about was finding a business (or method) that could produce a good quality and permanent photographic image on fabric. We tried one place (I forget where, but we found it by googling) and we had two A4 images produced, one in colour and the other in black and white.

 

 

 All the cousins.

 

I made up two mini quilts in proposed colourways and put them through the ringer. Literally. I put them through the wash and then tumble dried them.  The instructions that came with the fabric recommended hand washing only, but we knew that just wasn't practical for a bed quilt in a boarding school.

 

 

 Here are some close ups of the fabric. The detail is pretty good!

That's my Nephew Angus.

 

 This is my Elizabeth.

 

 

 

 

And here is how the mini-quilts looked when they came out of the wash.

 

It was obvious the photographic fabric wasn't going to withstand regular washing and harsh treatment. Fortunately, by then we both started to go off the idea of the memory quilt anyway. 

 

Lucky for us, Angus was easily directed to other quilts designs.

 

*Update May 2013*... the new quilt is currently at the long arm quilter and I hope to gift it to Angus in the next month.  

To The Fair

The Perth quilt and craft fair opened today in Perth, so I took a few hours off and caught the train into the city to check it out. I stopped by the bank on the way and made a cash withdrawal :P

 

I spent the first hour wandering through the QuiltWest Quilt exhibition marvelling at all the gorgeous quilts on display. I took quite a few photo's, but mainly close ups. This year I seemed to be drawn to the quilting. Wishful thinking maybe?

This is a close up of a Trapunto quilt... The top layer is white batiste and it was quilted onto a layer of white wadding. Most of this wadding was carefully snipped away (except for the feathers and the vine areas) and then the quilt was sandwiched with a layer of bright red cotton. The pink colour is the red showing through the white batiste and the white areas are where areas where the wadding wasn't snipped away. Amazing hey?

 

This is another Trapunto quilt, but with two layers of white fabric. The quilting was absolutely mind blowing. This quilt won best in show for good reason.

 

This quilt made very good use of dense quilting to create raised 3-D area's on the quilt.

 

Eye detail of the above quilt.  

This quilt is hanging straight, but the 'orange peel' quilt design was cleverly curved to create depth on the quilt.

 

This was a quilt of nudes at the beach.

 

I loved this quilt. It was a beautiful art piece with relatively simple quilting, but very effective.

 

Gotta love some Kaffe fabric! This quilt was getting a lot of attention because of the very unusual border/binding treatment. The body of the quilt was pretty simple strips of Kaffe Fasset fabrics  (with lots of hand quilting) but the quilt had been edged with large flowers from Kaffe fabrics.

 

I think they were stiffened with felt, or perhaps with wadding and then somehow appliqued onto the border of the quilt. I couldn't look at the back of the quilt so it was hard to see how it was done. It was very effective though.

 

This was a wall hanging of a countryside scene was made completely from tiny hand-pieced hexagons. I'd guess they were 1/2" hexagons!! The wall hanging was about 30" x 40" so there must have been eleventybillion hexagons in there.

 

Just to give you are idea about the detail of this quilt have a look at this close up. The hexagons were fussy cut so well that area's of fabric were cut up and then pieced back together into a complete picture as per the original fabric.

 

I loved these little grass tree's quilted onto the corner of this quilt

 

I was also impressed with these swirling feathers creating lots of movement on this quilt. Just like a windy day.

 

This is a flying goose detail on the wing of a bird.

 

I spent the next hour of my time away walking through all the stalls at the fair. I did one circuit without buying anything, to check everything out first, and then I spent the last hour backtracking and making my purchases.

 

I stopped by at Gail B's to get my self some $3.50 fat quarters. I am collecting fabric for a navy/red/white quilt and this little bundle sees that little stash complete. Now I just need to find time to make the quilt!

 

So Cute! Moda Candy are a newish type of precut. Its the baby daughter of a charm pack. The squares are 2.5". I couldn't resist and bought 2 of those.

 

My biggest fabric splurge was a kit to sew up a X&+ quilt using Moda 'Comma' fabric by Zen Chic. I saw one on display and it looked fabulous. I had to backtrack a few times and stare at it just to make sure I really wanted to cough up so much money. Now that I have it I want to get started on it straight away!

I also bought this little knitting pattern book for these funny little knitted 'cuffs' that you put over your boots. They don't do anything but look quirky. I think they are very funny and I am itching to knit a pair and try them out.

 

I also bought a few other quilty gadgets like seam rippers, rotary cutter blades, a new rotating cutting mat.

 

All up I had a great day and felt happily exhausted as I caught the train home again.

 

Incoming yardage because of the fabric splurge = 12.75 yards...Happy quilty memories = priceless!

Mitred Squares Bee quilt

Well Howdy. On the weekend I finished this quilt top. It's a Bee quilt that I started last June when I posted out my fabric and put the instructions on my blog. Doesn't it look great? I want to thank all the Bee girls that made blocks for me :)

 

It was my first bee and on the whole it was a great experience. The blocks took longer to come back that I was expecting and a two people have never posted back. I think, though, I am very annoyingly, anal about deadlines- anything slower than super-quick was too slow and I had to remind myself that it wasn't fair to impose those deadlines on other people. When I was making and selling pram liners I would quote a 6 week turn around time and have the item posted in under 2 weeks! I put the most stupid amount of pressure on myself sometimes! Anyway, one lady in our Bee went AWOL completely. Her month was very early on, so she received lots of lovely quilt blocks, but after that she just disappeared! We all sent fabric to her not realising something was amiss. At the conclusion of the Bee we started a 6 month (ultimately unsuccessful) crusade to make contact with her.  One bee member even sent a pre-paid, addressed satchel to her so she could just put in the fabric and post it back no questions asked. That was 2 or 3 months ago and the parcel hasn't been returned. She is still active on Facebook so we know nothing tragic has happened. Some people are strange hey?! Denni if you are still reading my blog- Post the fabric back!

 

Anyway back to my beautiful Bee quilt! My quilt is built from 3 sizes of mitred square components; 9.5", 6.5" and 3.5". They all puzzle together simply, but look really complex and amazing :)

 

I asked members to make 2 blocks, one consisting of a single large mitred square and the other block consisting of 1 medium mitred square and 5 small ones. I asked the Bee girls to send them back as individual components, though, so I could mix all the squares up good and proper when I put the quilt top together.

 

 

There is a real mix of colours in here, which on the whole I think works, even though there are brights mixed in with soft pastels. In hindsight I wish I had restricted the colour scheme, or perhaps only picked stripes that were one colour with white. But I am still happy with my quilt.

 

 

The quilt top came together beautifully with all the points meeting up pretty much perfectly. I was surprised at this, because my last few quilts I have lamented at how inaccurate my piecing has been and I thought it would be worse with this one since the blocks all originated at different houses.  I guess it helped that I checked every block and trimmed down if necessary.

 

 

I have this top already sandwiched and hopefully I will be able to show you a finished quilt real soon.

 

Its really hard to calculate how much fabric has gone into this quilt top as there is a lot of wastage cutting triangle units for the mitred squares. The quilt is quite small at 46"x51", which represents about 1.5 yards of fabric. I am going to conservatively double that to account for the wastage and record it as 3 yards of outgoing fabric.

Rainbow scraps

My sister went shopping in my stash again and helped herself to 2 yards of fabric. One yard of it was some rainbow scraps that she turned into this lovely quilt top.

 

 

Cute hey?

Courageous lion toddler backpack

This week I made this awesome toddler backpack for my friends little boy who turns 3 today. Just over a year ago he was diagnosed with a very rare and aggressive brain cancer and given a very poor prognosis. He is currently well and in remission, but his future is still very uncertain. The mind boggles at the journeys some people have to walk in this life. That's all I am going to say about it... its too hard to go there and this blog is not the place.

Suffice to say, though, that the little guy who this was made for has gone through a lot in the last year and has born it all with the courage of a lion. When he was first born I made him a quilt, and when he was first diagnosed with AT/RT I made another quilt so it was time to make something OTHER than a quilt!

I tried this free pattern from Ribbon Retreat and made him an awesome lion backpack.

 

Here is the inside. I cant remember what this fabric is called... but I used up the last of it and only just had enough. The internal pocket is just a simple patch pocket with gathering. I would have liked to add a welted pocket with a zipper, but ran out of time.

The little lion face was inspired by this image here. It was one of the first things I ever pinned on Pinterest (48 weeks ago!) and I am delighted to finally have found a place to use the idea.

 

I created the mane by drawing a rough circle on a piece of paper and dividing the circle into 12 pieces of pie (30deg angle between each piece). I cut the piece of paper in half so foundation pieced the fabric onto the two half pieces. Once the papers were removed it was just a simple step to join the two half pieces to create the complete mane. The face was appliqued on, felt nose and ears inserted and the mouth and eyes were stitched on over the top.

 

I made a couple of changes to the pattern. Nothing major, I just substituted some polyester webbing for the straps and bag hook, instead of using fabric.

I used wadding to stiffen the bag, quilting the outer pieces to the wadding using a very rough pebble design. Its almost impossible to see from the right side of the fabric, so here is how it looks on the reverse.

 

Here is a pic of the bag mid construction.

 

I used 2 yards of fabric in this backpack.

 

Bloggers Quilt Festival- Spring Storm

Hi and welcome to my blog! This year I would like to show you my mini-quilt called 'Spring Storm', which I made for a mini-quilt swap in November 2012.

 

The finished quilt is around 24" square. The design, which is my own, is based on the traditional Storm at Sea block and I used a foundation/paper piecing technique to create the quilt top. It was my first real go at foundation piecing and I really enjoyed the experience.

 

 

I am not a very confident free-motion quilter so rather than ruin all my beautiful accurate piecing with crappy free-motion designs I stuck with some simple 'ditch' quilting.

 

 

Normally I use more bold colours and improvisational/modern style piecing, but ever since making this quilt I have been exploring the more challenging (in my opinion) aspects involved in traditional quilting.

 

 

Here is a picture of the back of the quilt- I am in the process of sewing down the hanging sleeve.

 

 

I made a 'twin' to this quilt, which I kept for myself. This is something I plan to do for any mini-quilt swaps I participate in. For the twin I used a completely different colour scheme which I think failed miserably!

 

Thanks for stopping by :)