I don’t really want to say too much about this quilt as it’s a present. One that is known about but the details have been left to me. The main fabric I ordered from Spoonflower as it matched perfectly with room decorations. Now it’s arrived it is more perfect that I could have imagined.

I’m taking my inspiration from this pattern by Johanna, Except I’m going to be using squares rather than the elongated diamonds.

Next up was solids for the sashing and binding, from the one and only Justine over at Simple Solids I opted for Caribbean and Chartreuse.

As an extra treat I also ordered some Lipstick flannel sketch, for the backing. Now this was purely for the benefit for the recipient completely, nothing to do with me wanting to play with this lovely fabric. I’ve heard such good things of this fabric, she’s going to be one lucky girl.

So From the 1st of the month I am basically starting from a pile of fabrics and a plan. I haven’t even done a stitch yet. In 31 days time I want a completed quilt.

WISH ME LUCK, gonna need it!!!

It started with my panel that I made in Karen’s Blueberry workshop and a pack of her blue scraps. I quilted this and decided after a bit of debate that a sewing machine cover would be much more useful than another cushion at this stage.

So after a bit of makeshift pattern making I decided to back it with Tailor Made Scissors by Cosmo Cricket, I used the minty spots from my Sodapop quilt for the side panets and the multi-coloured tape measures for the side pockets.

I had a lovely Monday evening sewing with Emily and Bex a couple of weeks ago and I made a fair bit of progress. It was nice to have a couple of hours of stitching, chatting and cake eating.

Then there was just a little bit of stitching left to do to piece the end panels and bind around the bottom edge.

I’m really pleased with the finished results and think my little Elna will like having a cosy warm cover to keep the dust of now.

I had been wanting to give it a go since I saw Karen first talking about teaching, but I thought another craft and skill could cause me problems. If I get addicted to anything new at this stage who knows what my happen. I was worried about it being something I couldn’t do at home, needing lots of new expensive equipment and space. I’m already out of a craft room since Fraser came along. Could I really kick Dave out of his office space so I had somewhere to get messy?

Well what can I say, I think the answer is going to be in the long term YES. One of those cellar rooms will become my screen printing room, where I can make all the mess I like. I think Karen will vouch for me, that I really don’t like mess. You wouldn’t know it from looking at my house. I’m pretty good at making the mess, just not so good with being disciplined to clean and tidy up.

Karen was a brilliant teach and so enthusiastic about her work and sharing it with others. I must be honest that I probably would have never thought about taking it up. Meeting Karen once at a craft meeting in Leeds and then following her antics on twitter, flickr and instagram really made me think that I would like to have a go and it was possible for me to try.

I’m not very confident in my own design skills, in that I have no official training or qualifications, I’ve never been to design school. But the workshops made me realise that I just need a simple idea and a bit of patience with a knife!

Karen gave us some great tips on how to make it possible to do at home and on a budget.

By the end of the day, I’d finished printing up a tote bag, and HUGE tea towel (the bigest thing I’ve ever seen called a tea towel) and a load of fabric swatches all printed up ready for me to sew into something. As yet I am still pondering, I’m a bit like that with fabric I buy. Leave it a while before I dare cut into it and use it. *update see my last post here, for my first creation.

To top of the day I meet two new lovely friends and we had a great day with Karen, snooping through her design books, eating cake, gorgeous home made soup and more cake.

There are a few things I have and want to do this month, more prepping jobs than any actual finishes so I thought it best to take a month off.

But then after posting this block on Instagram, wondering what to do with it, a friend suggested turning it into a sewing machine cover.

You can see more about the design I created in my other post today here.

Well what a perfect idea, I need one for my lovely little Elna that I will be taking to Fat Quarterly retreat in July and I do need one.

So what better way to make sure it gets finished than to move it from my To Do/Planned list on my Sewing WIP Trello board over to the doing/in progress list with a deadline of 30th April.

In for a penny…

I finished with a matter of hours to spare on March’s A Lovely Year of Finishes challenge.

More photos to follow in next few days as it’s a bit dark right now and this is a really crappy picture:

Let it be known I’m very happy and can’t wait t snuggle with the boy under our new quilt.

Here it is, my “a lovely year of finishes” challenge I’ve set myself is to be sleeping under the Sodapop quilt I started last year.

If you read my post at the time, you’ll know I was disappointed not to finish in time for Allegory’s competition. I have had a go at it a few times since, but not really spent any decent stretches of time on it, hence it is still unfinished.

I’ve just done a count and I still need to quilt across 15 of the 19 rows and then complete the section at the bottom that didn’t have the appliqué on to follow as a guide. Now I have my new frixion pen, this will be tons easier.

I cut out the strips for the binding last week, so the final bit will be the ever so small task of binding around approximately 308 inches of quilt. I went for 2.25″ width after a discussion on twitter the other week. Consensus was that this slightly narrower binding is easier. So I hope it works as this will be the biggest stretch of binding I’ve done so far.

Ohhh what am I thinking, the binding will probably take me a month on its own.

Rolled and ready to enter the Pfaff

Well here goes, at least a row a day (and I’m already 6 days behind, so must crack on tonight), then 2 weeks to bind, that’s a starting plan maybe, might leave me spare time to work on my other projects. Getting very excited over the Siblings Together quilts which are being prepped as I speak and a little owl quilt for my cousins little girl we are planning and designing.

I never just have one thing on the go. I think this is typical of any kind of crafty type!

Wish me luck, I’m seriously going to need it.

Tonight is a request for any wannabe quilters or sewers in my timeline or wherever you may find my blog. How would you like to join a small but very friendly group of quilting/crafting types for a regular chat on a Tuesday?

You may have seem a flurry of random tweets from me anytime between 6-8pm on a Tuesday night, that make it look like I’m having some weird converation with myself! Well I’m not. You may have even blocked the hash tag because I bug you with it on a Tuesday. It’s the one time in the week when on twitter I join in a group called #TalkNT2 run by the lovely Cara of @Caraquilts.

I stumbled across the chat through one of my quilty twitter friends and just dived straight in to what was a particularly mad week.

Sometimes the chat is sponsored by a fabric shop and they offer a prize for just being in the chat (you don’t have to answer any questions!). Sometimes Cara will have a theme and a set of questions that she’ll ask to get us all talking and sharing experiences. Other times the conversation just takes its own course and we learn something we weren’t expecting.

I can’t always attend, due to baby duties; other people have similar situations: tea time, bath time etc. So no pressure, we just try and join in as much as we can to catch up.

Cara is based in the USA and has a bigger chat #TalkNT but it’s in the middle of the night for us Brits, so she has this smaller chat round about their lunch time for us to join too. So it’s nice we get a real International mix.

If you’ve never used one before there are sites you can use to filter and join in with conversations to make it easy to see what everyone is saying or you may have a lists option on your client. I use Tweetchat; simply put in the hash tag, sign in with your twitter ID and the conversation is rolling.

Took me a little while to get the settings right first time, as there were so many people talking I couldn’t keep up. I spent most of the night just laughing and not really joining in that much. The timeline moved so fast I couldn’t keep up. Since then it has quietened down, so much less intimidating for a newbie to join. (I clearly must have been mad to go back the 2nd week) But seriously it was fun, and I have met some lovely people on twitter that I may not have known before.

So I’m putting a call out to my crafty friends on twitter to ask you to come along and join me and the rest of the (I think mainly) ladies on there.

Its fun, informal (drop in and out when you can) and I usually get some great tips or gems of advice that I wasn’t expecting.

The cushions for the Finish A Long are done.

Oh wait I may have referred to these as pillows previously. Language etiquette – I’d call these cushions, ones that go on the sofa or as mine are right now, behind my back on my desk chair! But I know some of my American or International friends would call them pillows (pillahs depending where you’re from!).

As you’ll know I went with the ric rac trim. My mum had just recently seen a tv programme showing a way to make sure you end up with just the right amount showing through. Not too much or too little. So glad she did as I would have probably spend ages working it out, and getting it wrong.

So first up I laid it around the edge on right side of the front of my cushion, just so the trim edge is matching up with the edge of the fabric, just like so:

Then I stitched it exactly down the middle to secure in place. The stitching line is important as it acts as the guide when attaching the back of the cushion to ensure that exactly the right amount shows through.

Next up, I placed the backing piece/pieces right side down on top of the front piece. So the right sides are together with the ric rac sandwiched between. I was using an envelope style back, so I had one piece bigger than the other to create an overlap.

I created a little crease in the join so you can see where the opening is on the black and white stripy section. You couldn’t see it laid flat, camouflaged in all those stripes. The lower half is the bigger half on my cushion. No big bum puns here please.

Then I flipped it over so that I was feeding all the cushion layers together through the machine and could see the stitching line from the ric rac. Following this line I created what should be perfect seams.

This project involved a lot of firsts for me:

• half square triangles/HST
• project with Sketch and Summersville (yes I finally cut into them)
• cushion covers
• attempt at a free motion quilting FMQ design from Angela Walters book (Up to now I’ve just been whinging it!)
• envelope style backing (as these were technically cushion covers, I’ve done a cushion in the past which I’ll tell you about the tatty old thing I’m currently sat on one day, when it’s been through the wash)
• and finally ric rac trim.

Working to a deadline helped me get them done rather than being just another unfinished and unloved project and once I get some offical kind of craft room/space back they will sit all pretty on the sofabed.

Finally a great big thank you to my mum who looked after Fraser yesterday so I could finish the last cushion off. I really did have to twist her arm, and they had no fun whatsoever!!!

You see George there just trying to do a sneaky photobomb.

Here he is managing a full on face bomb. I ended up with a blurrier picture, so a slightly clearer one below.

Next up my Siblings Together quilts, yes hopefully two of those babies, if I’ve calculated right and I get my act together. I’m not sure I’m going to add them as the March challenge as I may need that motivation nearer the deadline I have set in June!

Then I came across a sample I’d tried of some FMQ I was learning from Angela’s book Free-Motion Quilting. I was originally going to do around the white borders but I’d obviously written the idea off in my head thinking it would just be too fiddly to learn on this tiny border. I was limited for time and I didn’t want to mess them up.

The red was my original attempt, before the revelation that was to follow.

My friend Katy came to the rescue with a demostration of an erasable pen on Vine. I hope you can view that depending on how you are viewing this post.

Isn’t it just magic!

Within a couple of days I’d managed to venture out to the shops and found my local supermarket had them in. I was a bit dubious if I’d got the right thing as there was no mention of ironing away but for a few quid I thought it was worth trying.

Low and behold they worked and they are just amazing. It certainly gave me the confidence (maybe falsely) that I could add the FMQ to the borders and still finish the cushions by next Thursday!!!

I had a practice (that is my practice piece in yellow and blue back on the first picture) then went for it on one side of the border. See below the blue stitching on the left, the pen marks have just ironed away.

Now tonight’s plan is to get the rest drawn up and sew sew sew.

It’s backing will be cut very soon, I promise. I also want to learn how to FMQ freely, without this little assistant, but I know that takes time and lots of practice.

If you don’t follow the group on Flickr or my antics on twitter you may not know that I was donated some lovely yellow & blue fat quarters by Lizzie to go towards making the quilt.

When it arrived it promptly went in the wash and was dried and ironed. (Anyone that knows me would be surprised how quickly I turned the washing, drying & ironing stage around). I never do for clothes, but quilt fabric is different, right!

I had already roughly planned on a fresh zig zag pattern, but wanted to wait till I had the fabric and colours in hand to be sure.

Once I measured up the washed and ever so slightly shrunk fabric I knew that I would be able to squeeze out not one but two matching quilts from it, if I added a couple of FQs. I was so pleased as I thought it was a lovely idea for the siblings to get matching quilts to be reminded of each other during their time apart. So from my tiny stash I managed to find a couple of suitable matches.

Before I started cutting I decided to dive into Touchdraw to really plan out the quilt and check that the number of yellows and blues would work well together. I did want it to be a boys quilt but think this could be a great unisex quilt, maybe for older kids on the outcome.

I’d seen Touchdraw tutorials on Lilysquilts so I managed to create this template

The colours are by no means an exact match of the stash, but a representation of the number of yellows & blues I would have.

This was my first attempt, which I abandoned before the colouring stage as I realised I’d got my HST all the same way, no good for a zigzag. Quicker to just start again.

So the outcome of my playing & cutting was that I was pretty pleased with the rough outlay of the quilt, and I LOVE Touchdraw.

Hopefully cutting white out tomorrow night, then the piecing may commence. I’ve never done a zigzag design before and I’m sure i’ll end up approaching it from a non conventional angle but very excited for this quilt these quilts.

Please comment if you have any suggestions, tips or ideas on how I could improve this design. I’m always happy to take on constructive criticism (I think, be gentle)

Thanks for visiting again.