A new robot project

I made a baby quilt with the cogsmo robot fabric line a few years ago. Still love the colours and the designs. Every time I see my leftovers, I think that I want to make another quilt. Eventually, I settled on another baby quilt, featuring the robot fabrics as off-centered squares on white background.

Let the chain piecing begin!

Sailor's Delight

Felt like doing a quick little quilt and decided on simple rail fence pattern. For some reason, I was stuck on the white-blue combination I had picked out for the aborted wedding quilt, so I picked this dark -- medium -- light combination of blues:

As planned, the quilt came together in no time. I cut 2.5" strips, sewed them into triplets of, and cut those into 6.5" long pieces. I then sewed those together in a 5 x 6 block layout as shown here:

I've gotten as far as the first border, a thin strip (1" wide) to contain the pattern:

Then summer, travels and visitors "happened", so this is one of my many WIPs.

As soon as I saw the quilt top center, I was thinking of marine things, so the name came to me in a flash: "Sailor's Delight"!

Now it has an owner

Friends of mine needed a baby shower gift and asked to buy one of my quilts. They chose the pink and grey one and asked to have it personalized.

The baby's name is Bjork, so I played around with the arrangements of letters.

We tried to come up with something for the second side, and in the end decided on the birth date. That didn't look good vertically, so I turned the letters to face inwards (it felt more of a unit than one of the sides facing outward).

I didn't like the colours of the birthdate at first (the purple was too dark and heavy), and settled for a more subtle mix of colours.

Then I zigzagged around each letter, dot and number. My god, it took forever. There were so many round shapes (which take longer because of the constant turning). I hope the next baby is called Lilly and born on 1.1.17!!! :)

I've been told that the quilt was a huge hit ;) What better news to warm a quilter's heart... Now I hope this quilt will be spit on, puked on, washed lots and loved for years!

Diamond Dash

A finish!

This babyquilt was finished in February. I've left the borders unquilted to either add the name of the recipient-to-be (this quilt was not made for any specific baby) or some random stitching.

I'll try to take some photos of the back and the quilting. I basically stitched with a walking foot about 1/4" from the coloured diamonds in the gray areas, to emphasize the diamond pattern. I stitched-in-the-ditch along the brown strips holding in the diamonds.

I painfully noticed my long break in finishing a quilt. I cut my binding strips 2" instead of the usual 2 1/4" I do to get a nice tight binding. In this case, binding this quilt felt more like adding piping. It was a very tight job, and I had to crop the outside seam to almost 1/8" to make the binding strip reach below the seam on the back! But I've learned, 2 1/4" binding strips to be cut next time!

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!

Try Leslie's Fudge Balls!

Did any of you see Leslie's recipe for Fudge Balls the other day? I copied it down and finally had time to make them - they turned out perfectly! I didn't believe they'd stay round while baking, but they did! Awesome! I made sure they turned out okay by tasting 3, ehm, 5 balls. And one more before bed, in case they changed since coming out of the oven. Oh, and a couple this morning, cause you never know...


Make these, they're awesome!

Oh, and this is a quilting blog, so I'll include a quilt, too :) I was actually super productive on Saturday, doing something with quilts that have been waiting forever to be... well, made into quilts. I'll just show you one today, since you're probably already drooling allover your keyboard from the Fudge Balls.

When I made the brown Chicks and Elephants quilt,
I had planned to make a copy with off-white sashing. I ended up not doing that but had some pieces cut, which I turned into this on Saturday:

I had thought about adding another white border, but was happy with the current look, and the size is my usual baby quilt size (30"x40").

Oh, gotta go, I see some fudge balls in front of me :)

Another day

... another snow storm!



Supposedly all 10 Canadian provinces had snowfall on the same day, even the city of Vancouver, BC (they of course have snow in the Rocky Mountains of BC, but normally it just rains in Vancouver in the winter - their record is something like 43 days of rain in a row - I couldn't do it... even if parts of the province are called Sunshine Coast). Some of the territories (farther north) had blue skies at the same time, but -35 degrees; maybe it was too cold to snow there?

In miscellaneous news: As I replied to some of your comments, I found something other than my laptop to fit into the "too-small" sleeve I made. Having this pretty cover around my statistics book somehow makes me feel better about statistics. And that's a good thing, because my head is already buzzing with the analysis of some data sets for work!


Remember my blue and aqua quilt?


It's being packed up this afternoon to start a long journey all the way to Australia, where one of my friends finally smartened up and had a baby so that I can start giving my many baby quilts away :) She lives far enough south of Queensland that floods aren't a problem, luckily. Not sure what the point of a quilt in the summer is, but hey, it must get cold there sometime ;)

And lastly, I thought I'd share my Disaster Quilt misery with you. This latest disaster happened back in December, but I've been oppressing all thought about it since then...
Well, the disaster itself happened even earlier. Here's the full story:
I had my triple Irish chain quilt top center finished since early 2009 or something horrendously long ago like that. I finally gathered my will to add borders, but didn't want just blah-solid borders and also didn't want to add more than two strips per body. Strange determination, but there you have it.


So I came up with this fancy 45 degree angle corner pieces on the outside border (the purple in the above photo; the green is the main border). I had a few problems with my calculations - or is that "lack of calculations"... here's a hint - do not eyeball the length of strips when you're attaching them with diagonal seams! After piecing and adding and adding some more, and then adding another strange contrasting fabric in the middle of the border because everything was too short, I finally got it right, or so I thought!

I put the quilt away for a while to recover from all my measuring head aches, then took it back out before Christmas to see if I couldn't baste this quilt to at least meet some of my 2010 goals (remember my sidebar?). Well, I had it all spread out on the batting, ready to sandwich, when I took a step back to admire my handiwork and saw this:


Good thing there are no small children Miss Manners around my place :) Corner on the right is how it's supposed to look. Corner on the left side, not so much. I could have cried! I guess I must have been working late at night once again, to make such a mistake. Argh! This quilt has been disastrous from the start (apart from picking the fabrics, that was super easy...) - all my fault and laziness of course, but frustrating nonetheless!

On some "good" day in the future, I will sit down and fix this corner, then baste the quilt and do some extra large meandering all over the quilt to be done with it with minimum effort! No more fanciness on this quilt!!!

So, do I get snickering and "silly you"s or does anyone out there have a load of sympathy they'd like to send my way????

Here, Chicky Chicky

Looky here! It's pretty much ready! (Binding still to do)

I once again couldn't get myself to do an overall-quilting-pattern, so it's turned into more of a free-motion sampler :)


Thought I'd share the different styles I used with you:





A free-motion grid! I didn't do too bad with the lines, eh? I did mark them with a disappearing marker (pink, from Singer - it kind of disappears faster than I can quilt, actually), but I only had that idea *after* I started the first line and didn't want to take the quilt back out and start the line again, haha! So I marked the grid very awkwardly and somewhat haphazardly with a ruler while the quilt was in the machine (meaning I didn't have a very even surface underneath). The lines are about 3/4" apart. I kind of like the grid look, though this block reminds me of an oven mit - they must use that pattern a lot! :)

This was the easiest block, I just outlined the printed squares...


Feathers and loops (easier to see on the back, which means this was a great piece for practicing! Who says you can't practice on a real quilt????)


McTavishing on the opposite side:
And of course: PEBBLES!!!

I love this fabric, the bead curtain - so 70s! I went along with the pattern and did some connecting lines between beads of the same colour.

Concentric circles around these green rings that fell in the brown water:


This one was fun - I kind of just put the needle down, get an idea and go for it. So maybe these could be invisible plumage on the chickens???


And I guess the brown dotted block didn't photograph well - it has one big spiral on it, but didn't show up well in my lighting.

I love being at the binding stage of a quilt again. I love hand-stitching the binding. I know many people don't. Too bad, we could trade off unwanted tasks!