Five on Friday. Five stages of a quilt.

I've just finished a quilt that I started last July. Eight months isn't that long for me. Considering almost all of it is procrastinating about the next stage. To celebrate I thought I'd join in with Amy's five on Friday series, and make a light hearted not to be considered as a tutorial five stages of a quilt post. 

1.Preparation and Design. Spend hours over several evenings, completely trashing the living room with fabric, and then sitting cutting small pieces into smaller pieces. Try to decide what to do with them.

2. Piecing. Once you've selected your design and cut your fabric strips you can endless join them together into squares. And then unjoin the squares, move them round and then join them up again.......

3. Quilting. First spend hours on the internet trying to buy a replacement part for your machine to stop the thread snapping. Order part. Dither for hours about how to actually quilt the thing. Enlist helper who will watch you closely as you work, 

and then quality control all the stitching for you.

4. Binding. Ponder fabric choices for several weeks and then finally ask teenage recipient of quilt who picks out a choice in five seconds. Become strangely addicted to a tv series on netflix whilst you spend hours hand sewing.

5. Testing for comfort and warmth. Put quilt on bed. Set a stop watch to see how long it will be before the cats find it.

gloomy weather crafting

It's been wonderfully foggy and grey and gloomy lately. Also quite wet. Not great for getting the last shots of the autumn colours, but perfect for gloomy foggy walks.

Gloomy weather also is perfect quilting weather, creating cosiness is the perfect antidote to winter grumps, and when the skies are a multitude of greys then creating colour becomes important too.

The log cabin scrap quilt that I started here suddenly started to take shape once I'd finished my star quilt, and at this size was a perfect lap quilt, but I had some logs left so it was always going to get bigger.....

First I change a few blocks in the bottom right corner, as I wasn't convinced of the colours, and then I added some more rows at the side and the top.

I'm yet to decide on the colours for the top left, hence the gap. Yellows and oranges perhaps?  Or Back from green into blues again. I'm thinking probably the latter.

I'm enormously impatient to finish it now, and cuddle up in it's warm brightness on the sofa with some dvds and popcorn. 

Also bringing colour on this gloomy day. 

Doughnuts!

Gluten free doughnuts! 

All the way from London.  

Hope you have a lovely weekend, 

I'm waiting for Miss K to get home from school and then that pink doughnut's time is up! 

joining in with Silverpebble's  making winter and Jennifer's Winter project

Starry Starry Night

Starry Night Quilt. November 2013-October 2015.

Hurray, I just got in under the two year time window! Although a good part of the latter part of this time was putting off the actual quilting of it, and then finding a solution to the endlessly snapping threads that were driving me mad.

Anyway enough of that that. You want to see photos right. The problem is that photographing the largest quilt in the world is not easy. I enlisted a friend. We went out into the woods. One person really can't hold it on their own. We tried a self timer on the camera, and I nearly fell off the wall we were balancing on, and nettles stung me through my jeans. You have to really want a photograph to put up with nettle stings in my world.......... 

Then I balanced it on my head and pretended to be a giant ghost.

We tried out some props, but I really couldn't bring myself to drape it over the rather mucky but lovely vintage tractor........

so we retreated back inside for me more tea and I just draped it on the sofa instead.......

in reality though it's easiest to photograph quilts in their natural environment.

on the bed.

details of the rest of the quilt story can be found here, here, here and here!

scrap quilting part 3

I've run out of white fabric for the log cabin scrap project, and I was in the mood for something quicker and less intricate than the hand pieced hexagons .

1 1/2 inch strips to the rescue. Too narrow for the log cabin. Random lengths and an eclectic mix of colours. I just joined a few of the same colour and shape together, and then sewed it to another few of a different colour. When I had a few joined I made another section and then another, and joined a few of those together.

A couple of hours of chaotic piecing whilst everyone else in the house was still sleeping.

There is no plan for the them, but if I'm storing them somewhere it might as well be on my wall.

They make me smile when I walk into my room.

liberty trees

When you sew with liberty fabrics there are inevitably little scraps leftover that are too small to be useful but to gorgeous to be parted with.

In cases such as these then tiny scraps can be turned into intricate appliques.

They are incredibly fiddly to sew, but lots of fun!

do you have things that can't be parted with? and do you ever turn them into anything else?

scrap quilting part 2

scrap quilting part 1 was a log cabin project, scrap quilting part 2 is all about hexagons.

one very perfect sized ornament shelf turned hexagon display box, lots of 2 1/2 inch fabric squares. many paper hexagons,

basted on the back, not going through the paper, just catching the corners,

slowly and satisfyingly the boxes are filling up.

Pretty soon I'm going to have to make a decision what to do with them all.

Random scattering of colours?

Stripes?

or perhaps more traditionally more hexagons?

what do you think? what's your favourite paper hexagon design?

scrap quilting part 1.

In January when I sorted out my fabric and had a massive folding session I also sorted out many many strips of different sizes. 

These are the 2 inch strips and they are slowly becoming a bright and random log cabin.

Each block is part white, and part one colour, with the logs selected at random.

I'm having lots of fun choosing where each block might go, there is absolutely no plan.

When I run out of strips, I'll stop.  

star quilt progress

I've finished the piecing. November 2013-January 2015.

size 90 inches x 100 inches.
or 34  x 38 squares. = 1292 squares.
consisting of;
500 blue triangle squares
500 green triangle squares.
125 blue squares
125 green squares.
42 white squares.

I've pieced a back together from some large pieces of liberty I bought to make a sundress and a shirt and never did....... but I'm not happy with the arrangement, so I need to have another go at it, I think I'll cut the paler section on the left in half lengthways, and sew the other section to the right of the dark fabric. it might balance it. or not. I shouldn't obsess too much, it's the back after all.

I'm also dithering over ordering wadding. I usually use quilters dream blend, but this quilt is HUGE, and I think that will be too heavy, so I'm wondering about warm and natural.  It could be that in all reality that all I am doing is procrastinating about actually quilting the thing!

folding

after weeks of mock GCSE exams (Miss K sitting them, me invigilating them - not usually Miss K's....) what was needed was a bit of de-stressing.

First of all I made the most incredible mess all over the living room, and then the sorting began.

According to amount of fabric each piece was folded around a cardboard template and then stacked neatly in boxes. You have no idea how happy this made me. Which I will readily admit is pretty odd.... The teeny pieces were sorted by colour and now have scrap boxes all of their own. I have great plans to cut them into even sized pieces ready to become a quilt project at a moments notice, but for now I am just enjoying looking at my neat folded pieces.

Happiness is found in the strangest of things it would seem. x
Hope you find something this weekend to make you happy x

seeing stars part 2

this week I have stolen a few moments to play with stars.

the more there are, the happier they make me.

other things coming up this weekend to make me happy; taking the stars to show a friend and going on a cake hunt.  I like cake hunts. They're less dangerous than bear hunts.

hope your weekend is lovely, and that you find cake too. x

the story of the magic scrap bag

Once upon a time some scraps of liberty were liberated from a friend, and I started a star quilt.

In exchange for the scraps I made a few of them into a fabric bucket bag, which I gave as a gift to become a new scrap bag.

What I didn't realise what that this is a magic scrap bag, every so often it refills itself.

The contents are glorious scraps of colour and pattern,

I select the blues and greens and try to create order from chaos.

and square by tiny square

it is slowly evolving.

I took the scraps on my running away weekend.

the net result of which was approximately 47 cups of tea, the occasional glass of wine, and 270 triangle corner squares.

I think I almost have enough now.

the slowest ever quick charm square quilt

quite some time ago (6 years..... maybe) I bought a little charm pack of fabric thinking it would be fun to make up a simple and quick quilt.

piecing the quilt took not much time at all, I went for the simplest design possible with huge areas of white sashing.

for a variety of reasons the quilting took rather longer......


my little helper for one.
and choosing a backing fabric.
oh and straight lines that weren't straight.
then once I'd finished it I decided the lines weren't enough and went back and filled in some more...

and then the next stumbling block. I'd used a charm pack. all the fabrics matched from one designer and colour range. I never work like this. I normally sew with the children's old pyjama's and random fabrics that I like/have in the house/got given scraps of by a friend....
I tried for months to find some more of the fabric, but could only find one of the designs and I didn't think it would make a good binding. I dithered about using a plain colour, or some of the backing, or just using white.

in the end I remembered the golden rule "when in doubt go for spots."

and finally it was finished.

just in time to become a birthday present.  I'm not going to admit how long it took me if I'm asked......