Heisenberg

Happy New Year!

My partner and I watched the series Breaking Bad a few months ago and were big fans. As a memory, I made him a mini-quilt with the silhouette/shadow-face of "Heisenberg".

I started by googling images online but ended up having to piece together two images, one for the face and one for the hat. I traced these images right off the computer screen onto some tracing paper.

Then I thought: "How the heck do I get this onto fabric now???"

Luckily, I remembered some fantastic posts I've seen in the past, about sewing right through the paper. So that's what I did.
 

First I sewed the outline of everything, then I started filling in the shaded bits.

After that: time to pick out all the paper. Some fiddly small pieces! But they come off so easily after being perforated by the needle.

I cut out the shape of the hat and machine appliqued it on top of the hat, then framed the whole thing slightly off-center with black binding.

Here some close-up shots:

And here's the back. I put loops into the corners (just out of some ribbons that I cut out of T-shirts -- those that stores use to hang T-shirts up, but which always poke out of the neckline when one puts the shirt on, so definitely needs to be removed in my household!) so that it could be hung up on a wall or pin-board easily.

I forgot to measure it, but it's roughly 6" x 8".

Tea Time

Today I am sharing a commissioned work with you. It's a cover for a lidded stove, 2 by 2 feet finished size. The lady who ordered it provided the fabric (which is not quilting weight cotton but a heavy cotton weave --- this made it tricky to work with, because it frayed terribly, but it was lovely and smooth to quilt). She wanted a kitchen theme on the cover.

I started by browsing the internet for tea cup and a tea pot shape, which I printed and traced onto thin paper. I then cut out blue fabric in those shapes and used a zigzag stitch around the edges to apply the shapes to the quilt top.

I quilted the details from the tracing paper with contrasting thread. This gave the shapes some nice dimensionality, too.

To make things easier, I did not cut the thread till the end and just hopped from spot to spot.

Here's a view of the back.

I quilted some steam coming out of the tea pot (the first layer was in matching beige thread, but you can just make it out here.

With the same beige thread, I filled the background. I thought about tearing out some of the wavy lines right down the center and redoing them to get better perspective, but in the end, it was not worth the effort, so I left it this way.

I added some blue thread to emphasize the steam coming out of the tea pot and used proper quilting weight cotton in matching blue for the binding (just attached to the front in this shot).

Here it is all sewn down by hand (possibly my favourite part of quilting)...

And here's the back, including the label, of course!

It was a fun little project, though I once again noticed that I prefer non-commissioned work. I can do what I want without wondering whether the customer will like it, and there's no deadline!

Merry snowmen table runner

Inspired by this post which somehow has to do with this BOM project. 
Hah, it took me only a whole 20 min of browsing likely candidate blogs on my blog link list; I had of course totally forgotten where I had seen this (almost a month ago!), but wanted to give credit. 

Apparently, this strip (with two more snowman heads) is part of a larger wintery quilt, but to me it screamed table runner, along with the name of the lucky recipient :-) One christmas present down! 

A colleague of mine wanted to make it too, so I wrote up instructions. Will post this as a tutorial soon...

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!

Holding up well!

This quilt was gifted almost four years ago, when this little gentleman was born. I just received this photo from the lovely mother. It makes me happy to see this quilt (a) still in use and obviously cherished and (b) holding up so well, after what likely amounted to a gazillion washes...

A walk in the park...

Looky here! The center of the quilt top for the Afternoon Garden Path is done. I'm quite pleased with it, if I may say so myself! I'm particularly happy with the subtleness of the intersection motif, the brown-green diamonds. 

Quilt progress

Ah, I have figured out how to do Email posting! This will make my blogging life much easier...

Here's how this quilt began --- an inspiring assortment of fabrics from my stash. I was obviously craving warmth...

I did some figuring to start with, then began sewing strip sets together: 

Halfway through, I decided that I did not want all the blocks to be identical. That's when things became difficult... Because to avoid having the same fabric in neighbouring patches turned out to be tricky. That's the downside of a scrappy triple Irish chain.

In the end, I had to do a lot of labelling to keep the correct order of strip sets, and a lot of piece-by-piece adding of patches...

But the quilt grew and grew, against all odds.

Next time I'll show you how far I got!