Border choices

These quilts definitely need peppy borders, they're too dull, not enough popping colour in them.

I've experimented with some colours, trying to pick up the red in one of the fabrics.

Nice match for the orange-red in the colourful square

Too dull

Too red

Too busy

First one it is then :)

And for the other (light version) quilt, something to pick up the green squares would be good. Let's see what the stash has to offer!

NaturalFeel: Light

Here's the light-coloured sibling!

More orangey than I had expected...

NaturalFeel: Dark

Tadaaa, here's the center of the first quilt top finished...

It'll be fun to quilt in the large background areas!

Layout time

When you have 4 of everything and many of one thing (i.e. the beige filler squares, since I didn't have enough light-coloured charms for all the 9 patches), layout is always fun. 

I do try not to have the same pattern next to each other, and to get a bit of balance. I find taking a photo and looking at that helps to get an overview...

Now cut the rest of the brown background squares and rectangles and I'm good to go...

NaturalFeel Babyquilts

Those baby quilts I mentioned the other day will be following this single Irish chain pattern and will be hand-quilted just as this quilt from a few years ago:

I felt like using natural colours and picked some left-over charms. Can't remember the name of the pattern, MODA something :)

There'll be a dark version (brown background with beige chain) and a light version (beige background with dark brown/green/orange chain).

It'll be lovely to be working by hand on a small quilt again; I'm really quite looking forward to the handquilting! My finger tips have gotten awfully soft :-)

Something is happening...

... a little bit of quilting!

Do you know how -- as soon as you don't have something any more -- you want to use it? Well, I've loaned my sewing machine to a friend who wants to fix her curtains. So of course, now I have the urge to quilt.

In the absence of my machine, I sorted through patterns and fabrics (especially my charms collection) and prepared the pieces for a couple of baby quilts.

More to follow on these later...

And the Warm and Fuzzy quilt I posted about last --- well, it was missing 2 corners. Yes, I just had to cut 2 triangles and couldn't get myself motivated... until now!

So as soon as my machine is back, this quilt top will be finished, and the 2 baby quilts will be assembled!

Triangles and squares

Playing with some charms (Moda Wonderland) to make an easy-peasy quilt. Sometimes easy does it.

The rest of the charm pack (all the pinks and browns) are going into this HST-quilt. I think I have enough charms in the right colour-line. I'll just have to get creative if I don't. They're sewn together, but I have to press them, and I seem to be very reluctant to pull out the old ironing board! :) Funnily enough, I posted about these HSTs before, when I had "decided" on a layout :) So times change...

That carpet, by the way, is horrific. I miss my old hardwood floors dearly, but that's what you get when you rent ;) Not sure how I'll baste my next big quilt, I've never done anything other than tape them to the floor during basting... a first for everything!

Hooray, it's working!

Thank your for your advice about google reader! It's much easier to follow my favourite blogs now, though as was pointed out to me, I still have to load the blogs to comment, so please forgive me if you don't get many comments from me anymore!

I've worked on a couple of pieces recently:

1) finally started the quilting on Free As A Bird (see sidebar). So far, I'm doing the brainless stitch-in-the-ditch (with brainless, I mean that I didn't have to think about what to do, it's pretty obvious, no marking or designing required :) I still think it's one of the most difficult quilting methods - it's so easy to slip out of the ditch and then it looks pretty sloppy!), but I ideas for the large grey triangles are brewing...


2) I used the rest of the drunkard's path blocks to make 3 wall hangings (they're just stuck together on my make-shift designwall right now. It's not so much a design wall as a 'get things off the floor' method, since my floorspace here is much more limited than before... I think I may have shown pictures of these wall hanging triplets before (pre-sewn together).


Well, my quilting output is still not up to pre-move-levels. There's just so much other fun stuff to do here! Come winter, it'll probably pick up again :)

Bear with me, and happy quilting!

Northern Solitude

ASIDE: Isn't today an amazing date? Can you imagine how many people are getting married today??? 10-10-10! :)

2nd ASIDE: Ah, you should know me by now ;) Of course I went and googled my question. I didn't find out how many people are planning to get married, though something might be in the news tomorrow - instead, I found out quirky stuff about this date from this site. For example:

--> In mathematics, the date of 10/10/10 or 101010 is divisible by the number of days in a week, which is seven (7), which is considered to be very lucky. However, the date also appears to have a yin and yang situation where the date is also divisible by the number six (6), which is considered to be very unlucky.

--> It is even more significant that the date 10/10/10 at 10:10am (10:10) or 10:10pm (22:10) to be a very lucky time. One reason for this comes from the story of George Inmad who had been deaf since birth. On 10/10/1910 at 10:10pm (22:10) he suddenly was able to hear with no explanation from the doctors. It was a medical mystery and the only conclusion they had was that he was very lucky. From then on, it is believed that you will have good luck if you touch your ears at 10:10am or pm.

Back to your regular feature: quilts!


Only 1.5 years after I started it, this little quilt is finished! What pushed me in the end??? Someone I know wanted to buy it for his first grandchild :)


I added a label and a bit of extra quilting on the squares, and two days later it went to its new home.

In the end, the quilting consists of outline quilting on the squares:


... some motives being outlined in the squares and something I saw on Dianne Gaudinsky's blog (see my blog list on the right) in the narrow light blue border:

(This photo makes the quilt look huge with the background glimpse, doesn't it? It's only the regular 30x40" I use for baby quilts...)

In some squares, I quilted along lines of the print, e.g. along the green vines in the dark square below:


This border seemed like a good idea when I started, but was very intense - when I finally finished it, I was in no mood to do anything in the wide border, so it's left unquilted - incidentally, having finished the blue border quilting was also when I put the quilt away until last week.

Tsh-tshing, Finish #1 on my "QUIPs To Finish in 2010" list on the right! :)


PS: I wonder why I put the dark green square next to the brown square in the centre... hmm. Must not have known the trick of taking a photo of my layout and then checking that out instead of the actual quilt - photos give a much better impression of the overall layout, I find. Do you have a trick like that?

Yesterday, I baked a lovely apple cake with caramel sauce that Leslie showed on her beautiful blog:


I thought I had a bundt pan but couldn't find it despite searching and searching - only then did I realize that I thought about buying one and then ended up not to ;) Senility is setting in!

Also, I went to a National Park yesterday to go for a hike. I had a kite along that I bought this summer. I've realized there is no easier way to recapture childhood than to go and fly a simple kite (i.e. nothing fancy, just the regular diamond shape with a tail!).

Go ahead, try it!

Left-over Decision

Hmm, I'm about to post about a project that I didn't even include in my QUIP (QUilts In Progress) list the other day. Dang.

Anyway, the left overs from my WonderChain quilt are still kicking around. I've decided on a layout:

There'll be grey strips between the corner blocks as borders.

Now I'm thinking I should make it at least lap sized! I feel like something other than baby-quilts - I'm getting too many of those.

I guess I'll add it to my list now that it's not just a pile of HSTs!

So Many Stitches

As promised, here's Finish #2, the Love U in green quilt. Concentric squares take a long time to hand-quilt, I found out. I don't know how hand-quilters do the intricate patterns (on traditional quilts), which must include thousands of stitches! (Hundreds of thousands? Millions?)

There's something about hand-quilting that just looks more traditional, isn't there???


Or maybe I just choose square quilt-patterns that I wouldn't do with free-motion (wobbly straight lines for me) or a walking foot (too much turning) machine quilting.

I find that printed flanelette on the back makes the quilting and any mistakes disappear, but you can see the pattern even on this small picture.


As mentioned, I did concentric squares in the solid green blocks. The prints are MODA Love U, I picked all the green and yellow prints and substitute a few from my stash to reach the right number.


For the border, I tried another stencil out of my collection - I'm usually more a fan of wavy lines, but the straight edges of this braid seemed to suit this quilt.


Now that I look at it on the photo, the briad reminds me of a strand of DNA ;) Such a science geek, hahaha!

I might yet stich in the ditch around the little yellow squares in the 4 corners, they look a bit lonely right now, and that wouldn't take too much effort.


Overall, despite taking quite a while (4 or 5 months, I think), I'm glad I hand-quilted this quilt and even more glad that it's done!


I won't even show you a picture of my pour right middle finger (the one that I use to push the needle through). My ring finger is starting to have the same hole in it, because I switched over when the middle finger was too damaged to touch a needle ;) It'll heal, and it better, because I still have about 3 circles to quilt on my BIG hand-quilting project, the Imagination 1 quilt, and that must be done for the quilt show! (Though I bet no one would notice a half circle in among all the concentric circles! So the pressure to finish is only moderate - apart from my pride!)

Soon, I'll be ready to baste and quilt the Filmstrip Cafe quilt, still debating quilting options. I might do parallel straight lines on it, as I've seen it on other quilts and liked it. Oh well, time for another anti-strep-throat pill, ugh.

Two Finishes!

Well, I'm sitting at home with strep throat, bored out of my mind, so I managed to finish two quilts this week, and one of them hand-quilted, wahoo!

Today, I'll show you the machine-quilted one (won't have anything else finished in the next few days, so I've got to stretch this over at least two posts ;)

The only thing holding me up with my Hoot Hoot quilt was the lack of embroidery thread and needle. For how little I needed to do on this quilt, I didn't want to go and buy everything needed, but I was lucky enough to find someone I could borrow a needle and a foot of thread from! After that, it only took a day to get the claws and 'ear-hair' on the owl:


I basted the quilt that same afternoon.


Didn't have any hesitation deciding on the quilting, for some reason... sometimes the ideas just snap right in, other times I have to hum and hah for a few months, it seems.

I started with the owl, outlining the wings, body, face and pupils as I didn't trust all of my hand-applique to hold up during subsequent washes. I also quilted some feathers (the owl kind, not the decorative kind) on the body.


Next, I loopy-loop quilted all over the background. I learned that you have to plan carefully where to start if you don't want to cross lines and end up where you started WITHOUT having to go around the outside of the quilt first - puffiness alarm! I made it work somehow, but next time I'll think ahead ;)


Lastly, I outlined around the wonky stacked coins. That was a bit of a pain because I used a walking foot, so had to turn every 1/2" to 2". Luckily, it was a small stack of coins!


And here is the finished product!


You can even see the owl outline on the back (on the left in this pictures)!



This quilt was fun to make and I love the personal touch of my own applique shape. Maybe I'll make a series next, I'd love to make a giraffe and an elephant!!

Stay tuned for finish #2!

Hoot Hoot Greetings

I've finished appliqueing the owl to my Hoot Hoot quilt.

I'm currently searching for my big needles to embroider "ear hair" and claws. I'm getting a bit impatient to get going, so if I don't find them soon, I'll go and buy new needles.


Question for you: I also can't find my stash of embroidery yarn, do you think wool will do the trick or should I just go and buy some thicker yarn (embroidery or darning or whatever)?

Leftover Options

Thanks for all your suggestions/votes for the Wonderland Leftover HSTs the other day!

Seemed everyone liked a different layout :)

I've found a totally different layout in the Connecting Threads magazine I get in the mail. I think I ordered from them once or signed up for a newsletter and am getting this magazine now. It's fun to browse through for pattern ideas. Anyway, I'll need to collect a whole bunch more HSTs for whichever layout I choose, so there's another project moved to the back-burner! :)

Just a heads up that it'll be truly quiet here for a week or two. Come back in late July for an update :)

By the way, if "Karen in Pennsylvania" reads this - I appreciate your comments and have been trying to reply to them but don't have any way to contact you - you don't have a profile and there's no reply address. So if you'd like to get replies, let me know you're email!

Wonderland Leftovers

Well, I'll start with the non-left overs! My fabric orders have arrived, so I know have a treasure trove of Wonderland fabric (and some other Moda prints, mostly from the Freebird series):

Don't you love how Buttercuppity packaged the yards??? So cute and done with so much love, that was a really nice touch!


Back to the leftovers: I had a few charm squares left over after making the Wonder Chain baby quilt, and they've just been lying around until one day I decided to turn them into HSTs with gray background fabric.


I've been playing around with layouts, but am not in a rush, so for now, I just took some pictures for comparison and stacked them all up again!

Straight HSTs:
Flying Geese:
ZigZag:
Diamonds:

If you were me, which one would you pick?