Turquoise Babyblanket

I am slowly updating this blog with my creations of the last two years.
Here is a turqouise and grey babyblanket for a collegue. I had asked for her colour choices and decided to do a scrappy wild geese quilt. To lighten things up, I added the occasional yellow print.

I like quilt's where the eye cannot quite catch the overall appearance and has to focus on small parts. It was well received by my colleague, so I think she liked it, too.

 A closer look on the geese blocks and the quilting.

The quilting was very difficult, because the batting was very thick. The baby will lay and crawl on it on the ground, so I wanted to provide a thick isolation. Never again! The back fabric is an IKEA fleece blanket bought on sale. The quilting pattern is a large meander with flowers in between.

Ready for Mystery

Though the timing hits the final rush before christmas, I can't wait to start Bonnie Hunter's
Mystery Quilt 2015.

The fabric is picked from stash, bought, and ordered (still waiting for the package) and I am ready to go. My latest quilts were on the easy side piecing- and quiltingwise, so I am hoping to be pushed out of my comfort zone.

Here is my maschine set up and ready to go. Still 1.5 h until Quilt Cam, where I will be playing with my box of half square triangles.

Allietare week 1, half square triangles

It is half square triangle time. Please visit Quiltville Allietare part 1 for the instructions by Bonnie Hunter and to join the fun.

While I have probably done a gazillion of half square triangles, it is my first time with a specialty ruler. It takes me some time to get used to, so I am sloooow. But this mystery is supposed to be a learning experience so I am pushing through. Please note at the cutting photo, that I am very serious with rotary cutter safety. The cutter blade is unprotected, because I literally was in the cutting process, cut, take picture, cut more.

Some test half squares. yes, they fit to the right measurements.

 More half square triangles. Seriously... LOTS of them. Quite a mess at the ironing board.

But they do make for a pretty garland.

I am about half way through with my units... But I love huge quilts, and small units, and repetitive sewing. It puts me right to a meditative mind set.... now off to sew some more. Looking forward to friday for part 2!

Cathedral windows pincushion

Hi all,

I am bad with pincushions. I am a passionate about sewing, I send a consideral amount of time with my sewing maschine, I have several hundreds of pins.... but no pincushion.
Until.... today!
I have eying with the cathedral windows pincushion pattern from the modabakshop (found here) for ages and today it was the time to try it. Since I have embarked on my quest to sew Bonnie Hunter quilt with gazillions of little pieces, I needed an instant gratification project.
So here it is:

I like the way the pincushion came out. However I disagree with the amount of "waste" fabric in the initial pattern, but I anyway cut my fabrics mainly from yardage and two leftover charms (the purple fabric) so I wasted less treasured fabric. Next time I would also sew the button on, before I stuffed the cushion. It was q bit tricky, though not impossible to do it afterwards.

What kind of pincushions do YOU use?

Another babyblanket for a coworker

Hi all

as soon as I heard my coworker is pregnant I announced, that I want to make her a babyblanket as gift. She requested mint colour, so I pulled all the mint, turquoise and aqua together and combined them with several shades of grey.

I like very random patterns, which require the recipient to look carefully and always discover something "new" in the pattern. The pattern I chose, was inspired from this blog post flying geese gone wild, though I scaled the pattern down a lot.

For the backside fabric I chose an Ikea fleece blanket I bought for 1 €. Fleece makes the quilt nice and cuddly and warm, perfect for a baby to crawl around without getting cold. I practiced my FMQ on this and did a meander with daisies every now and then.

The quilt finishes at about 1.10 m x 1.10 m.

I hope you enjoy. What have YOU been stitching?

A baby blanket for a coworker

This blanket was a gift for a coworker, who's wife expected a baby. They didnt know the gender and asked for a neutral green quilt. I added orange and yellow for contrast and made a quick and easy diassapearing nine patch. This is truely one of my favourite quilt patterns.
Quilted with green-yellow-blue variegated thread in a large meander. The batting is a high-loft poly and the backside is fleece, for extra warms when baby lies on the play and crawl blanket.

Finally DONE

This is a sort-of commissioned work I did for my sister. I wanted to make her a quilt and asked her to pick out colours and style, I wanted to make sure she really likes her quilt.

So, she asked for a charcoal and white chevron quilt. I ordered Kona cotton for this project and was very pleased with the feel and look of it. But beware, thinking “chevron quilt” I think “half-square triangles” so nice and happy I started cutting squares at 8 cm per side. Half way through the cutting I realized, that using half-square triangles would only be necessary for a scrappy chevron quilt. The two coloured version could have been done sooooo easily by cutting stripes and sewing blocks. Aaaaah, well, too much fabric already cut so I had to bite my teeth and continue the way I started.

I didn’t count the squares but they were PLENTY. I cut 9 yards of each colour into 8 cm square, so how much makes that?

Sewing was surprisingly nice and relaxing and the quilt top went together fairly fast, only being disrupted by a half year break due to work reasons.

First I decided to use a polybatting to work help with the weight of the fabric and doing some simple meandering to get the quilting part quickly over. I got talked over by the lady of our local quilt shop and simultaneously being a patchwork teacher to do a zig zag echoing the chevron pattern. Well, that resulted into a lot of threat breaking and frustration. Finally I figured I cant push this huge quilt around in zig zags, so there I picked out all the quilting and tried meandering. I managed to do over half of the quilt when I realized I didn’t like the look, also the poly had a too high loft, making it very difficult to freemotion on it. The meander took too much away from the graphic look of the quilt. Seam ripper how much time we spent together…

Next I figured I need a thinner batting, so the zig zagging might work after all… back to the LQS and I bought some thinner cotton batting. I freemotion quilted the zig zag echoing the chevron approximately 1.5-2 cm inside the seam. The plastic freemotion food was my guide and it worked quite nicely. Lots of repetitive sewing time, but this is something I enjoy and meditate to. I am pleased with the results and can’t wait to give it to my sister.

 This quilt is huge, measuring 2.6 x 2.8 m.


Update: Here is a picture of the quilt "in action". It fits nicely :-)