Winnings Part 1

I have been a very lucky and very slack blogger recently. Well, not all that recently. Back in December (blush) I was the international winner of a fabulous Big Bundle Giveaway from the Quiltmaker Blog to celebrate their 100 Blocks Blog Tour. As embarrassed as I am about how much time has lapsed, I still want to blog it, and give a huge thank you to Quiltmaker for their terrific giveaway.

Naturally there's a copy of their 100 Blocks, plus a beautiful book of colour palettes and a very handy book on Quilting motifs which I've already used as inspiration. Then there are four separate patterns for a variety of quilty projects, plus a kit with some very sweet fabrics. And then there's a packet of Bali Pops batiks! I've been wanting to start collecting some batiks for a while (I';m not entirely sure what for, but with the definit intention of using them in (a) quilt(s), and there are some truly lovely colours and prints in this selection. I just have to bring myself to take it apart and use it now!

So thank you very much to Quiltmaker, and apologies for taking so dreadfully long to acknowledge you properly!

Wholecloth???!

I was inspired by this quilt by Ferret I stumbled across by accident last week to have a go at a wholecloth. I love the idea of using white thread to draw on a black background, and of course being me, it had to be a snowflake. But as I started to draft the crystal, somehow my hand kept wanting to draw feathers. So I abandoned the straight-lines and points ideas, since the size I had in mind (around 20in square) wasn't going to leave much space to create the design with fillers anyway, and drew a feathered snowflake.

I thought tracing the design onto black fabric was going to present a problem, but a little creativity solved it effectively. My makeshift light-box consisted of my bendable halogen clipped to the table and turned upside-down, my 12.5in ruler, and eight tupperware cups held in place with double-sided tape. I also hold the pattern in place on the ruler and the fabric on both with a few pieces of double-sided tape. It worked a treat! Although with black fabric, make sure the lines on your pattern are quite dark - the heavy pencil lines were just ok, but the lighter ones too hard to see easily, so I went over them with a sharpie.

The ruler did get pretty warm though, so if you do this, I'd recommend turning off the light regularly - such as whenever you reposition the fabric. I traced with a clover white marker. Initially it looks as though its left no mark, but after a few seconds it shows up beautifully with just a single stroke. It comes out well with either water spray or ironing.

I stitched the snowflake outline with white Gutermann cotton, then experimented with fill options. I tried a few colours and threads and designs. The image below doesn't show it too well, but the top and bottom ones use a royal blue. The middle is a black and white variegated King Tut, but it wasn't the right place for it.

I ended up using royal blue Bottom Line thread, with a different colour (dark teal) in the bobbin. After I'd done the large feathers, I decided it'd be fun to turn it over and do the smaller ones from the back and have both colours showing. This is what I originally planned as the front:

Both sides look the same apart from the colour-swap, and now I can't decided which should be the front? Or whether I should make it double-sided. Apart from the label, that would be easy enough. But I can't decide between the binding fabrics; one works better with the blue and one with the teal. What do you think? This was originally going to be the back:

The charcoal looks a lot better in person than it does here. (ETA, I've sewn on the charcoal).

These are the two sides together for contrast:

Next time (there will be a next time) I'll fill the background with small swirls or something similar, not repeated echoing. I'm not entirely decided on this quilt's destination.

I'd also appreicate any tips for labelling a black double-sided quilt! My usual method would stick out a mile!

Twinkle, twinkle, Little star!

Seeing as I can't show a lot of what I'm working on at the moment, I thought I'd try and blog a few quilts which somehow escaped being blogged properly at the time. This post is actually about a pair of quilts, made for two sisters.

First came Twinkle, twinkle.

This quilt was foundation-pieced in sections; here it is in progress on a temporary 'design wall':

I'd pinned the background squares for each star in place here, and I used my camera to record my planned layouts as reference while I pieced them. Very handy!

Then for her little sister I made a matching quilt and called it Little Star. The only photo of this I blogged was this altered image here!

Here is what the quilt actually looks like:

I still wonder if the silvery snowflakes are too dominating!

This detail of the photo block shows just how similar they are. I printed out two squares (one per quilt) with the text and a centre-focused gradated colour background (after several trials in black and white on scrap paper to get the right size) onto printable cotton lawn and sliced them into QSTs to  position around the photo.

Southern Star, first quilt of 2010

Southern Star is my first quilt for 2010.

It lost something between the design and execution, and it's just not quite how I envisaged.

Although the quilting looks ok, the design shows up and little mistakes. And though it was fun to start with, I soon tired of it, as it's kind of boring, and frustrating to get it looking even and random rather than stacked and repetitive.

I do love the colours though. It's quilted with a beautiful variegated Aurifil 50wt cotton.

Next job is to find the time to make a quilt using more of these stars!

Hidden Star

Here's my first quilt photographed with ym new camera I'm thrilled with the improvement in clarity around the edges of the quilt, though I still have a lot to learn to get the best of of the camera.

Hidden Star is ready to give to one of the staff at James and Eleanor's chid care centre when she returns from holiday next week. It's around 55" square.

While I can't say I particularly like this quilt, I am really pleased with the effect of the quilting. I'm really hoping the staff I make quilts for this year do NOT choose pastels!

The feathery design was inspierd by Carla.

However, If I were quiting again, I'd just mirror the triangular feathers in the alternate squares, rather than do the weird two-size fleur-de-lis type things I ended up with.

I actually quilted the narrow border after binding it. I wanted to see how it would look unquilted ( it looked unfinished!) but I also felt that I risked distorting the border and therefore the quilt shape if I quilted it first.

It's been finished a while, waiting for time, suitable weather, and the new camera; this was the last quilt of 2009.

Summer holiday

It's been quiet around here, because we spent almost a week at Simon's parents' holiday house at Port Hughes, about 2 hours north of Adelaide. We had a wonderful time, with the boys (James included) out fishing most of every day and bringing back more than enough for dinner, and me mostly sewing. Unfotunately we've had a shocking heatwave which lasted until after we got home, and even with the a/c on full, it was siumply too hot to sew during the last few days of it.

Here's the study while I was pulling out what I needed to take with me to quilt; the 2 tubs on the table, plus pne other, were what came with me. Plus the machine, and my latge cutting mat and ruler which don't fit in the tubs!

I also took this:

The day we left I went with Daddy and we bought this, my Christmas present from my parents. It's an Olympus E620 DSLR. It;'s not the prettiest or most popular DSLR (which I had to get over!) but it has a couple of essential and fairly uncommon features.

The first is the live-view full vari-angle monitor. The second is somewhat technical and I've forgotten the details already, but suffice to say it will do a better job than most of giving me sharp quilt edges. Olympus is known for fantastic lenses, but not great bodies.

I finished this baby quilt for a little girl whose name I've only just discovered means 'Star':

I started another and got it ready to quilt:

And then I couldn't face dealing with it in the heat and moved on to my sister-in-law's wedding quilt. The wedding's in WA (Western Australia for the non-Aussies) in March. I've made the 3 8in stars and have 8 of the 6in stars almost made. But there's still well over 20 each of the 4in, 3in and 2in stars to go!

And the holiday snaps - more of Eleanor than James, because James spent so much time out in the boat fishing with Daddy and Pop!

At the beach (2-minute walk) after dinner one night; it was still HOT:

Too much time spent Wii-ing...

Playng with my new camera after Eleanor's nap...

New Year, New Quilt

Big surprise there!

I'm working on an overdue baby's quilt. It's a simple 4x4 layout, with fairly simple 8in blocks I'll have fun quilting. But I decided to include a feature block, which took longer than the other 15 blocks combined! For the mathematically inclined (like me) the bulk of the blocks have 12 pieces each (all rectangles), for a total of 180. The feature block has 80 triangles! I had to recount several times to be convinced of this.

The long sides of these triangles are around 1 1/8in, and the short side just under 7/8in. I love the block and will definitely use it again, but am not entirely sold on it in this quilt. I'm adding the borders tonight, and hopefully will like it better once it's done and quilted.