Fall Quilt Festival

You must have heard about it! It's time for the Fall Quilt Festival!

Here's my showcase quilt, the famous Character Quilt :)

This quilt is for someone very special in my life, a friend with a 'boy' in front of it.


I collected fabrics that illustrated his interests and hobbies. It was a long and winding road - who would have thought that cheese-fabric is so hard to come by??? (Blogged about here and here.)


Each framed blog represents a hobby or interest, for example:

He likes to cook:


He collects sea shells:


This quilt taught me a lot.

I tried my hands at applique when I couldn't find the fabric I wanted, for example a vinyl record since he likes to collect old records:

I also learned how kind fellow quilters are!

I'd been searching for sheet music fabric everywhere when I saw it in a quilt at a quilt show. The maker of the quilt was there and I asked if she had any scraps left. She sent me the small pieces she had left and I managed to join them into a block:


Then there was Ginny, who gave away some great coffee-themed fabric in a give-away package. I emailed her saying all I needed to win was the coffee fabric, so she sent me some of it (which was great, because I didn't win her give-away - I never win those!!! Boohoo). It made a beautiful block for my espresso-loving BF:


And lastly, I learned a new way of free-motion quilting: pebble-quilting

It was a lot of work, and like everyone says, it uses a lot of thread, but I love the effect, it feels great!

Since a lot of the theme fabric will likely not be used any many other quilts, I added some blocks to the back of the quilt, so now it's somewhat reversible:

I put the final binding stitches in 30 min ago - it's really hard to sew on black binding to black backing fabric using black stitch - lighting is key here. Of course I used Mal's invisible ladder stitch for the binding, the link is in my Quilty How To's menu on the right.

This will be one great birthday gift next month!

Now let's see your quilts!

Oops, Another New WIP...

When inspiration strikes, it should not be ignored - that's my motto!

I was tired of hand-stitching the binding on the character quilt and also fed up with working on a quilt I'm making on commission for a work colleague - it's been intense quilting on that project all weekend. So I browsed some blogs and found this one, which I'd bookmarked and always wanted to adapt to my own fabrics.

Well, there was nothing stopping me really - it's the beauty of quilting, you work on whatever you feel like! No deadlines (generally), no pressure.

So out of this


and this


came this draft layout:


It was quickly turned into rows of squares


then the quilt top center


and 1-2-3 there's the quilt top finished!

Size approx. 31"x43"


Yay for another work in progress :)

One Happily Finished Baby Quilt And Business Musings

I love it when plans work out. I brought this baby quilt along on a work trip last week, after a marathon-session on the weekend during which I quilted the whole thing, made the binding and machine-sewed it to the quilt top.


I finished hand-stitching the binding on the first evening of my trip, yay!


Here's the finished product, front and back:



I really really like this baby quilt, and here's why:

1) it has some neat fabrics:









2) the stippling goes very well with the backing fabric print, which is swirly:


3) the floating coins pop just as much as I had hoped:


4) but the best is this amazing see-through effect when I hold the quilt up against the light!


I hope some baby will have fun with this quilt some day.

I'm making all these baby quilts to sell and make a bit of money to pay for all my fabric purchases (though I haven't bought anything in ages after the buying frenzy earlier this year!).

I'm considering opening an Etsy shop but have some concerns about it:

1) customers can't see my work before they buy it; I mean, yes there are photos, but you can't check out every detail online, you can't feel the quality of the fabrics etc. I'd feel horrible if a customer is not satisfied with their purchase!

2) what if an order get's lost in the mail? I thought about this one and I could offer optional shipping insurance so that everything can be tracked (I've had some bad experience with an online order that never arrived...)

3) How do I know how much to charge for a quilt? Is there a formula? Do I just pick a number?

Do any of you have experience with selling quilts? I'd love to get your input!

New Tutorial Links

I think my blog updates on blog readers if I save any changes, so it probably just did because I added a whole bunch of links to good tutorials to my "How To" list. I hope that this will be a really good quilting resource some day and that you'll enjoy visiting the wonderful blogs who host the tutorials!

Earlier Than Planned

Well, I got those pictures up earlier than planned, so you'll get the pre-finished product (binding still to be done)!

Here's a preview of the quilted burgundy baby quilt with the floating coins.


I planned to quilt on it Friday night, but when I picked up my free motion foot, the piece that goes above the needle-screw was broken off. How very strange. It didn't happen during sewing and hasn't been touched in the attachment storage box. Oh well, so I had to go to the quilt store the next morning to get a new foot. When I started sewing with it, strange things happened in the tips of the stippling loops - the top thread would skip three stitches and form a straight line across. See next picture for two examples:


I was planning to blog about it and ask for your opinion, but I figured out later that the foot needed oiling because the spring that pushes the foot down to hold the fabric during sewing was stuck. I think that caused the missed top/bottom thread connections in the corner. It didn't happen after oiling the foot, but by then I had ripped out bad loops for the 4th time in a 10 cm section, phew!


The back is a pink flanelette and the binding a matching pink/burgundy peacock feather print.

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!!!

Okay, Back To Quilting

My last visitor has left, the dining table has been reverted to quilting and a good thing that was... because...

I finished the quilting on the burgundy floating coins (stippling) and on my friend's character quilt (pebbles) and sewed on the machine part of the bindings.

Sorry, no pics of anything today. They'll come in a week, when the bindings are sewn on both quilts! And then I'll also be properly back to quilting and blogging! Promise :)

My quilting class is going great by the way - I only have 4 students, but that's a good first class size and I have lots of time to spend with each student. Next class we'll start sewing 9-patches, so very exciting ;)