A Gem By A Newbie

So, the quilting on my mom's quilt worked - even without a special attachment! I ended up doing the quilting, because the machine was really tricky.

Then I showed my mom my favourite binding stitch (see Ladder stitch in my side bar for quilty links) and off she went round and round. There were a few moans of "Oh, still 2 sides left, phew." But in the end she zoomed around fairly quickly. We put on a label with both our names and the year, and now it's gracing her couch:



You can just see the pillows peaking out behind the quilt (on the top).


Here you can see some of the quilting - I did extra-large stippling to keep the quilt soft (and get it over with. I'm going to have nightmares about that machine ;) - it's really more a large meandering than stippling.



You all know I love MODA colours. This print is my favourite, so the two blocks in that print are my favourites on the quilt. I have a bit of yardage of the blue one, but of course don't dare cutting into it, because then it's used up and I can't use it in something else, hahaha. Still haven't gotten over that yet ;)


My mother is really really happy with her quilt and I think this one will actually get a lot more use than the "late fall" quilt (see side bar of my quilts) I gave her in 2008. That one is probably too big for something other than covering the quilt during the day... still looks nice though and fits her bedroom well.

I thank all of you for your nice comments about her progress and accomplishment making her first quilt (and she only started in September and really didn't work on it much for the months before Christmas, soooo... not shabby I say, not shabby at all!) - I've passed them on to her and she's really pleased to get such accolades from around the world :)

Isn't it nice to know you've made someone happy? Ah, the joys of blogging...

Quilting Without Special Attachments

Here's the last update on my mom's tranquility quilt, because it's COMPLETE, hah!

I struggled with the question of how to quilt this quilt since my mother doesn't have any special foot attachments for her machine and they were either not available or insanely expensive.

I had some great tips from you, my readers and it turns out that stippling doesn't really require a quilting foot, hooray!

It worked pretty well - the only issue is of course that the regular foot doesn't have a spring to move it down when the needle moves down - thus, as I pull the fabric around, the needle is repeatedly bent.

This needle didn't survive that process and broke...


I'm always so greateful that the needle tip is attached to fabric and can't jump up into my face at full speed!

The second needle made it through the rest of the quilt, and I tried to go a bit more slowly, as well.

The second question was thread colour. I hadn't considered in my colour advice for my mother, that a dark blue side combined with a white side makes thread choice tricky.

a) using two matching threads has two problems: 1) dark thread is heavier because of the dye in it, therefore tension problems are common. And 2) with the problems we had with tension during piecing, it was clear that both threads would be seen on both sides at some point along the quilting line.

b) I had bought a ton of invisible thread - and I hope I can return it. It's horrible stuff!
Well, I'll give it another chance on my machine at home, but the tension was off the board (I had loops of about 3 cm length on EVERY stitch on the underside. Also, the stuff feels aweful compared to nice cotton thread.

Do you guys have experience using invisble thread? Do I have to do something different with it compare to cotton?

Anyway, we ended up using white and blue thread and in the next post, I'll show you the results!

Pillows To Match

As I mentioned last Saturday, I had some charms from the MODA Tranquility line leftover.

Well, it happens to be around the time of my mother's birthday, so why not make her some matching pillows for her reversible quilt!?!


I briefly thought about a reversible pillow, but I think having two works better. Plus, she has this really wonky loooong pillow on her couch and I thought it'd be fun to make a case for that.

And really, I find sleeve-pillows like the ones I wrote a tutorial for much easier to make than ones with buttons or zippers, so the back wouldn't really be for presentation anyway.


From this distance, they turned out great, no?

I had a bit of trouble with the white pillow - I find it difficult to get the right measurements of pillows - they never quite behave the same along their entire length, they're less puffy at the ends, so my pillowcase tends to be too big at the ends and/or too tight around the middle.


In this case, I just eye-balled stuff and ended up having to make a wider back than front to fit the pillow. Which means that the top and bottom seams are actually on the front side instead of the top and bottom - but hey, if I hadn't spilled the beans, you'd never know :)


Enough talk, here are the pillows with the quilt tops (two tops, really - no back).


I also had fun using a stitch OTHER than straight or zig-zag - which is all my own machine manages (but the quilting attachments are cheap, yay!). So here's the finishing stitch I used to applique the charm squares onto the navy pillow (the white one is obviously pieced). I folded the edges under, rather than raw-edge applique as I'm a bit tired of that look.


That stitch sure uses a lot of thread! However, I think I might actually try quilting with a zig-zag stitch on a quilt soon - with a contrasting thread, that might be a really neat effect. We shall see!

Tranquility

Remember this quilt???


I helped my mother get started on it while she was visiting with me in September.

Now she's finished the top (navy) and the back (white), though front and back are really arbitrary names here, it's really a two-way quilt.


She's getting excited about sandwiching it!


I'm personally dreading the quilting a bit, as she doesn't have any special attachments for her machine (walking foot/darning foot) and I checked into ordering them, but the parts are either unavailable or horrendously expensive (it'd be cheaper to send the quilt out to get quilted!). It's an old old Husqvarna model, hence the trouble.

So we'll try the regular foot attachment and some straight quilting. Hopefully the fabrics underneath won't be pulled too much. Keep your fingers crossed :)

The charms are from a MODA Tranquility charm pack. I had some left-overs after my mother chose her 30 squares, stay tuned to see what happened to them...

Another Convert

My visitor last month was my mother who was here for 3 weeks. She watched me quilt for my class and was very excited by the whole process. She asked me to make a quilt for a friend of hers, as commission work. When I suggested that she could also learn to quilt, she was quite taken by the idea. At first, I thought I'd let her choose a charm pack to sew together as a baby quilt, but she doesn't really know anyone with babies, so we decided to increase the size to lap quilt for her couch by adding wonky sashing to the blocks.

She picked out 30 charms from the Tranquility series by MODA, navy gackground for the front and white for the back.

We took pictures of the different background fabrics to help her decide:

I cut the sashing fabric for her and explained how to sew the blocks together. She got almost all of them done here!


Next time I'm visiting her, I'll bring my cutting mat/cutter/ruler to let her square each block up and explain how to sew them together.

The back will be white with just 8 charm squares arranged in a 3-2-3 row layout. I have to buy more of the white fabric before I can cut those pieces, though.

She seems to like it a lot so far, so maybe we have another convert!!!