A special project: hand-piecing

For the longest time, I've been admiring quilters who piece quilts by hand. The skill and patience involved just amaze me. I decided to try it on one block and see how it goes. The answer is: slowly, very slowly :-)

It helps that I've picked one of my favourite colour combos: brown and yellows/oranges.

Let's see what will become of this project...

Almost there

Yay, these 3 are almost done! Just the binding to sew down, and tada!

I'm really excited about the quilting. Each of the quilts has different free-motion quilting on it. This one for example has spider webs in the circles. I am considering embroidering a big fat purple spider on this one ;) Still to be decided...

I did a fantasy pattern of waves and loops in the background. It's a bit much, but I'm getting used to it.

Sometimes, the batiks didn't flow into each other since I was limited by the fabrics in the charm pack. I happened to find binding fabric that matched the hues pretty well. In some cases, I attached the binding strips with straight instead of diagonal seams to match the fabrics on the quilt, like here:

The hand-sewing part of the binding is one of my favourite steps, so I'm quite looking forward to these 3 light weights on my lap while I'm stitching away! I have not attached hanging tubes on the back yet, since I couldn't decide which direction to hang them up in. I might just attached some small loops in the corners to keep the options open.

A First For Me

Mistakes happen. After years of quilting, the mistakes seem to be getting sillier and sillier. Like when you're preparing 27 feeting of binding and don't check that you're attaching a totally new strip to the end of the binding strip. This happened to me with the *first two* strips I sewed together. Lovely loop I created here. Totally useless, unfortunately.

Out comes the seam ripper ;)

Knitted Hat in Petrol Blue

In between quilting, I like to knit. I recently made a hat for myself. No pattern, just trial and error. Then I found some amazing yarn, petrol blue, mostly alpaca (70%) and therefore extremely soft. I immediately thought of a friend, whose birthday was coming up, so I made the hat again, this time for her and with this lovely yarn. It was handy to work with, and kept the store owner's promise that it doesn't get fuzzy over time.

I proved that since I had to redo the upper half FOUR times (!) before I was happy with the result (the hat kept being too short, and I had yarn left over). Every time, I had to open the hat up to the point where I started decreasing stitches, so that I could add a row or 2 (2.5 in the end), and see whether the final product reached past the ears! :) Man, oh man, if one has nothing better to do, eh?

 I particulary like the spiral pattern on the top!