A good day

I'm so excited to be the featured quilter over at Amy's Creative Side today. Amy asked me to send her all the information a few months ago and I had totally forgotten about it, so it was a lovely surprise this morning! Thank you to all my friends for leaving such sweet comments - you have almost had me in tears, dammit!

Another lovely thing was the arrival of a fab parcel from Empress Mills, courtesy of a giveaway held by Alison at Little Island Quilting. There was a whole load of gorgeous cotton thread, some bright red polyester thread (that has already been nicked by the 9-year-old for Very Important Sewing purposes), invisible thread and some lovely silky Egyptian cotton fabric. I can't wait to try out the cotton thread - it's 50 wt, like my favourite (but very expensive) Aurifil. It looks like it could be perfect for piecing. I'll make sure to let you know how it goes.

I've also finished my touch of yellow quilt, but that will have to wait for another day. It's proving very difficult to get decent pictures of the dark grey/black areas. I may have to break out the big guns (the SLR and photoshop). Eeeek!

ANOVA

It's done, probably, although I keep tinkering and stitching even though the binding is on and it's hanging on the wall. 

It finished at 12 x 16 inches in the end. Just a tiny thing.

I might enter it into QuiltCon. I'm a bit proud of this baby - it's me, if you know what I mean.

Get out of my head, dammit

As if having a puppy in the house wasn't messing with my sleep enough there has been a quilt brewing in my head, mostly at night. It was time to get the bloody thing out of my brain and into fabric.

It's little (about 12 inches by 18 or so, but I haven't measured it), and is made of eight or nine (I forgot to count) warm neutrals and a single pop of red. I'm going to hand quilt the bejeezus out of it in several neutrals and a gorgeous variegated red perle by Valdani that I picked up at the Festival of Quilts. 

It's called "Analysis of Variance", in a nod to realjob (it's a statistical method). I can't believe that I have finally named a quilt. I never thought I would see the day.

A little extra something

It's almost time to send off the Brit Quilt Swap mini quilt (assuming I can bear to let it go), so I snuck a bit of time yesterday to make a little extra something. I thought a pouch might be in order (not least because you can stuff it full of sweeties), so pulled out some scraps and put together another Perfect Zip Bag. I really love this pattern - it is so well written and easy to follow. I thoroughly recommend it to anyone wanting to try zips for the first time. 

Anyhoo, once I had finished it I decided that, actually, I really really needed to keep it. It's perfect for all the extraneous handbag crap (headphones, keys to my grandma's flat, car key, pencil, moo cards, shiv) that normally floats around and gets lost in the black hole that is my bag.

Luckily I had a couple of big-balled purse frames knocking around from the FQ retreat, so I whipped up a quick Summersville purse instead. I hope it goes down well. Maybe I'll shove a bar of chocolate in it to sweeten the deal.

We'll have to see how kind I am feeling. And how hungry.

(almost) wordless WIP Wednesday

It's growing. And I think I love it.

Small miracles

Lilly's little memory quilt is finished. It came together pretty quickly in the end, once all the interfacing and fussy cutting was done. Blimey, sewing knits to regular woven cotton is tricky. Even with the stabilising influence of the interfacing there was still a fair bit of stretching and wriggling going on. I have never been more thankful for my walking foot!

The quilting is really simple squares, stitched in the ditch. It's quite heavy and I wanted it to stay as cuddly and soft as possible. I broke a bit of a personal rule and machine finished the binding for a change. I figured that it would be getting a lot of use, and if I waited until I had time to hand finish it then Lilly would be about 37.

I took a sneaky day off from work and puppy duties yesterday to go to the Festival of Quilts. It was a lovely day out, although I will admit to feeling a little bit disappointed with the competition quilts. We need to stage an invasion next year, I think. The level of skill on show was amazing, particularly in the minis (tiny TINY flying geese, about 3 mm high. Seriously - how is that even possible?) but it would be lovely to see more modern quilts on show. Roll on Quiltcon!

A memory quilt

My lovely friend Siobhian asked me about a gazillion years ago if I could make a quilt out of her daughter's baby clothes, and last week a bagful of the most adorable sleepsuits arrived in the post. We decided on a simple design of five-inch squares, supplemented with bits of a Walk in the Woods charm pack.

I've never sewn with knit fabrics before (at least, not since a really badly failed attempt at a jersey top in my teens. Boy, was that a disaster!) so fused everything to woven interfacing before cutting the squares.  It makes things quite heavy, but at least it won't go wibbly when I stitch it together.

I love the details on some of the pieces - little pockets and embroidered bunnies. So cute!

I am hoping that the puppy/realjob/kids combo that I am currently juggling will let up a bit and I will get a chance to actually sew these together before little Lilly turns 12. Fingers crossed for a bit of sewing time in the near future - I'm getting a bit twitchy!

A couple of exciting developments

I'm pretty excited for a couple of reasons today. I've been waiting a while to join do. Good Stitches - the charity bee - and I finally got an invitation to join a new circle a couple of days ago. I am so excited to be able to give a little something back. This month our host Marika asked for wonky bento blocks in raspberry, aqua, green and grey. These blocks were so much fun to make, and I am sure the quilt will be just lovely when it is finished.

The other exciting development is the arrival of Katie, our puppy. So far she has sniffed everything, eaten some pretty dubious bits of garden, cried a bit, licked a lot more, and is now taking a nap. Being this adorable is exhausting, apparently.

So far there have been no accidents on the carpet, but she has only been with us for two hours. There's still time. I'd better get busy training the kids to pick up the mess.

Scrappy coaster tutorial

Scrappy coasters are my go-to gift. They come together quickly, you can make them to co-ordinate with any colour scheme and they help nibble away at the scrap mountain, which is always a good thing. I was making a set today (for a commission, excitingly) and thought I would put together a tutorial. They are not difficult to make, but there are a few little tips that make them even easier. So here we go - my first tutorial. I hope it all makes sense!

First gather your scraps. You can use even the tiniest pieces – some of mine were only an inch wide. You can iron them if you want, but I don’t usually bother.

Sew scraps together until the piece is bigger than 5 inches square. There is no need to iron as you go along – just hold the seams open as you stitch.

Finish one side of your piece with a long strip of fabric so that you have one edge that has no seam – it makes things easier later. Press seams open and trim the piece to 5 inches square.

Cut a 5 inch square of backing fabric and a 4.5 inch square piece of fusible batting. Centre the batting on the backing piece and fuse, following the instructions.

Place the pieced front and fused backing/batting right sides together and sew along three sides using the edge of the batting as a guide. This is where you want to make sure that the side you leave open is the one that has no seam on the front piece.

When you sew the pieces together stitch all the way along to the end of each side and then fold the seam allowance over when you turn the corner. 

When you start stitching the next edge sew over the folded seam allowance, through all four layers of fabric. This helps to make the coaster really square and means that you don’t need to clip the corners before turning and risk making holes. Not that I ever accidentally do that. Ahem.

Turn and push the corners out with a pointy thing (skewer, knitting needle, lobster claw...). Fold and press the open edges, using the batting as a guide. Use lots of steam to get a nice crisp edge. 

Using either a paintbrush or a fine-tip bottle apply a tiny amount of PVA/Elmer’s washable glue all the way along the inside of the open edge, then press with a dry iron to set. This might sound bonkers but it holds the opening together brilliantly for topstitching. I find that pins tend to make things go a bit wibbly. The glue washes out really easily, although to be honest you use such a tiny bit that it wouldn’t matter if it didn’t.

Topstitch along the open edge and quilt however you want. I like to continue the topstitching around the edge and then quilt in a concentric square pattern using the edge of the foot as a guide. I don't normally bother using my walking foot, mainly because I am too lazy to put it on the machine, and the normal foot is good enough when using fusible batting.

Rinse and repeat to make however many you want. I think a set of six makes a really nice gift, especially in a little drawstring bag like this one made using Jeni's fantastic pattern.

I hope everything makes sense - please leave me a comment if anything is confusing. I am new to this malarkey!

August already?

Not that you can tell from the weather. Bloody England. Oh well, the worlds crappiest summer has meant a lot of indoor sewing time, so it's not all bad!

I finished the mahoosive Bloom, sewed my first bee blocks, and made a whole load of other stuff. The school holidays are here now with all the associated chaos, not to mention the imminent puppy arrival (panic), so I don't think August will be anywhere near as productive. Although, that's what I said last month, so you never know!