"Happy 5000th" Give Away

As promised, I'm having a give-away in honour of my 5000th visitor!

Here's what you could win:


.4 m of red hat fabric with matching fat quarters in light yellow and plum. (the colours in the above picture are a fairly true representation of the actual fabrics, the ones below wanted to be purple in the picture, and nothing I tried would change that :) Same fabrics though!)

Here's what you need to do to get a chance at winning:

1. First entry: Leave a comment
2. 2nd entry: Let me know if you regularly read my blog (honour system for this one as I can't tell)
3. 3rd entry: Let me know if you've commented on my blog in the past (not just for this post ;))

Pretty simple, eh? Now go tell everyone who might be interested about this!

Entries open till Thursday at noon (PEI time :) )

I'll announce and email the winner on Thursday afternoon!

Curved Piecing

Alright, as promised, here's my jamboree curved piecing project!

First, my workstation with my fabrics. I brought all my batiks, most of which I had used in the bento box wedding quilt last year. Plus, I had some oranges, reds and pinks to throw into the mix.

We received a copy of the pattern that we traced onto freezer paper and muslin.


Then we had to cut out the freezer paper pieces and pick fabrics - that was the most difficult part for me, I just can't picture the final product!
I ended up just making some educated guesses on what I wanted there, and then followed my policy of

"Just do it and hope for the best!"

Here are the freezer paper pieces ironed to my fabric choices:

I cut out the shapes and laid them out on my muslin to decide on the last two pieces: the paper-pieced shapes!


Once I picked the colours for those, I learned a new paper piecing method, I forgot the actual name, something to the point of sew-fold-snip. Basically, the seams don't and up on the drawn line on the paper pattern, but instead the lines indicate where to fold and cut the fabric, then lay the next fabric on top and sew a 1/4" seam. It was pretty straight forward. Just the typical trouble of trying to save fabric by using small scraps and then discovering upon folding the seam open, that the fabric doesn't cover the whole pattern it should or that it angles in the wrong direction... like I said, the usual :)

I cut around those shapes too, always leaving a bit of extra fabric.
Oh, and then there was the tedious task of taking off the paper again, I hate that part for the paper pieced sections - the larger pieces that were just ironed on came off easy, of course!


The teacher told us to lay all the pieces out to decide if we needed to switch a print here and there. Well, heck no, after all that work I wasn't starting over, so I didn't even consider replacing anything. It was just for fun and practice anyway ;)


When all the fabrics were butted up against each other, I zigzag-stitched along each seam, again, easy-peasy and so quick!


Then I skipped taking a few photos :) But basically, I learned how to make bias tape with a cool little tool that I'll buy if I decide to make more of these! It was really quick and easy!

Using a really narrow straight seam, I sewed the bias tape down through all the layers of the quilt (incl. batting and backing) and put the binding on.


As of now, the binding is done and I've sewn on some beads, but I've run out of ideas :) We'll see if inspiration hits me. I'm kind of busy right now completing another guild project... the President's Challenge!! More about that soon :)

Quilting Jamboree

Last Sunday, I attended a Jamboree put on by my quilt guild.
There were a whole bunch of classes that weekend, and I was interested in three of them, but they overlapped, so I couldn't take the hollow cubes one:


Even though it was really popular - the largest class by far! (all the quilters are at lunch, but you see the sea of sewing machines!)


Here they're back from lunch :)

Instead, I took curved piecing. The two blocks hanging up were the patterns we could learn (choice of one). I decided to do the bottom one as it leaves more room for imagination than the leaves, in my mind. The table in front of the display was the teacher's work station and she brought a ton of fabric with her in case we didn't have a specific shade and to show what's out there - they were all batiks because she loves those.


Here's a close-up of the pattern I chose, it's called Sunrise by Lorraine Torrence.
If you click on the link, you can see the colours Lorraine chose, the ones shown here are from our teacher.

Here you can see some of the embellishments our teacher did on her piece.


One of the other students did the leafy pattern in these colours, pretty, eh?


Another version:


I'll show you my piece in the next post! I'm still working on the embellishment, but I actually finished it (except for the hand stitching of the binding) in class, frost scratch, so that was pretty cool!

I wish I had pictures of all the different pieces, because it was amazing how the different fabric choices resulted in totally different feelings conveyed by each piece! Hopefully the others will bring their pieces to the April guild meeting!

5000 Visitors!

Wow, I've had 5000 visits to my blog since I started counting last summer!

I'm planning to have a give-away in honour of this event - it'll come soon, the fabrics are almost chosen :) But first I have some fun posts lined up about a new technique I learned at an event organized by my quilt guild!

Stay tuned, and thanks to every one of you who stops by to see what's new in the world of this PEI quilter and especially to all those of you who take the time to drop me a line!

Toodleedoo!

PS: just out of curiosity, I googled the number 5000, strange idea, I know :)

I learned that James Madison's portrait was printed on the 5000$ bill until it was discontinued in the late 60s.

I also learned that a lot of people wonder if the Series 5000 Sleep Number Beds are better than the Series 7000 :)

And from Wikipedia I learned:
5000 (five thousand) is the natural number following 4999 and preceding 5001. Five thousand is the largest isogrammic number in the English language.

So I had to look up isogrammic:
An isogram (also known as a "nonpattern word") is a logological term for a word or phrase without a repeating letter. It is also used by some to mean a word or phrase in which each letter appears the same number of times, not necessarily just once.

I didn't bother to look up logological, because I got the gist of it the answer. But really, 5000 being the largest isogrammic number in the English language...

... who would have thunk???

(c:

Quilty Goodness!

After washing the baby quilts, I had a chance to hang them out on a sunny day, so now I too have photos of quilts blowing in the wind - they're so common in blog-land :)


I love how the quilting patterns show up in the sunshine and after washing.


Still get the church window effect on the floating coins quilts!


I just sold this quilt with the apple and the worm!


One of my first baby/lap quilts I made...

Now the weather is grey and rainy again, plus, that line was at a friend's house, so from now on, you'll get mostly "quilts in door frame" and "quilts on wood floor" pictures again :)

The Big Wash Day

So, I'm still going on about washing quilts! I'm just so paranoid that I will give a quilt away or sell it and the new owners have a bad surprise in the first wash.

So after washing my first baby-quilt last fall and figuring out that washing on hot doesn't seem to do harm in terms of shrinkage, I clenched my eyes shut and took the plunge - or rather, the quilts did. I also decided that young parents are not going to wash quilts separately with all the washing they have to do, so I threw all of my baby quilts in the wash together - I know DARING! I trusted that my pre-washing habit would prevent any dyes from running!


They came out just fine and are now neatly lined up on the rack to dry... Now at least I know that they won't be doll-quilts when their new owner washes them the first time!

Some Old Qulits

I thought I'd show you a couple of quilts made by someone my grandmother's age. They're well-used and -loved and still get lots of exercise keeping people warm at night.

Both seem to be truly made from scraps. I don't know if most of the colours faded or if fabric back in the 50s, 60s and 70s were just more muted than nowadays bold prints.

The first quilt is a simple 4-patch with 4 white patches in between the mixed prints.

The second one has tumbler pieces and is arranged symmetrically around the center length-wise fold for some reason.

You can see the symmetry in this picture.

Here are some of my favourite prints - they tend to be the bold ones :)

Yay dots!
Here you can see the symmetry again: how the pieces are mirrored on each side of the center line.


The edge wasn't squared off, so on two sides of the quilt the binding follows the tumbler-shapes. You can also see that the quilt is in bad need of some fixing, but I guess the owner (who quilts as well) isn't interested. I guess it's a true utility quilt rather than an heirloom ;)


Then I discovered by accident that the low light in the room gave neat effects when I didn't use the flash.


So I played around a bit, panning :)



I'll spare you the other 24 pictures I took spinning and jumping with the camera in hand :)

I hope some day my quilts will look as well-used as these two, and hopefully, someone will fix them to get another 50 years of use out of them :)