I thought it would be interesting for you to see the final forever homes for my recent commissions for paintings of Welsh castles. I’ve also made two quilted wall hangings for the same room. Both installations are designed to help soften the acoustics of what was/is quite an echoey space. So, here are the castles and sail boats in situ:
On Monday evening, it’s the monthly art journal session at The Studio. The theme for the session is ‘faux patchwork’, and here’s my sample. Quilting meets paper craft and art journaling.
Just so you know, there is no fabric, padding or indeed cotton/thread on this page. Everything you see is flat and stuck onto the page.
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I’ve completed two more panels for my appliqué memory quilt, recording our journeys in the USA over Christmas. These flank the first panel I made, completing the bottom row. I’ve started on the second row – the first row is the most tricky from a conceptual point of view, so I’m leaving that until last! I think my satin stitch has improved, and I’ve definitely got the hang of transferring my sketches to make fabric images.
Still to do: fabric interpretations of Trinity Church, Boston; The Chrysler Building, Rockefeller Center and World Trade One. All of those are going to take a bit of work to choose from the fabrics to get the best sense of depth with such a limited palette of colours. That said, I’m rather pleased with how the Mayflower turned out – the stripes on the side were part of the fabric, with careful positioning of the cutout of course…
No, you haven’t missed seven previous instalments – this is the first of nine blocks that I’ve tackled for a new memory quilt. I wanted to make a quilt as a ‘souvenir’ of our trip to the USA over Christmas – in addition to my travel journal which is yet to be finished…
We chose the fabric whilst away, in a lovely quilting shop, Stowe Fabric & Yarn, in Stowe, Vermont, and once I got home and had five minutes to myself, I started designing. It’s the first quilt I have made that uses appliqué techniques – and I’m going to need a bit more practice on my satin stitches I think. The quilt is going to feature nine appliqué panels, and here’s the first. No guesses as to which tourist venue this panel refers to…
It has been 18 months in the making. Well, may be a couple of weeks in the actual making, but with lots of gaps! This is my first (and possibly last) double wedding ring quilt, made as a wedding gift to good friends. I missed the wedding deadline, and their first anniversary, but managed to get it finished for Christmas.
I can’t believe it has been over a year since I have completed a quilt. That’s not to say I haven’t been quilting – I have a couple of tops that I have been procrastinating over (I really hate laying out and pinning), one of which is a year late being delivered (so sorry Beth and Mike!). These two table runners use Christmas-themed fat quarters that were part of Aldi’s recent ‘So Crafty’ promotion. You really can’t go wrong with six fat quarters for less than £4. They’re not necessarily patterns and contrasts that I would have chosen but after cutting them according to Barbara Chainey’s ‘Fast Quilts From Fat Quarters’ cutting plan, I put them together to make the main squares (12″x12″), before sashing and binding with left over fabric.
I used basic stitch-in-the-ditch quilting in the long table runner, and a holly leaf design of my own making for the shorter side table runner below. I actually quilted the smaller runner first, and had such a hard time marking the quilting pattern on the dark fabric that it put pay to more complex quilting on the larger.
I’m leading another quilt workshop at Quorn Country Crafts in Loughborough next month, and I decided to set myself the challenge of making a second sample in as short a time as I could (the first being here), to see how far an experienced quilter might get during the session. From start to finish, this small sampler took me just over 6 hours, including the quilting and hand binding. It measures 13″x24″ and used up some scrap fabric kindly donated by Sue who runs the shop. I took the opportunity to try some quilting designs I’d not attempted before, and given a little more time, I’d have done them a little more carefully (and across the whole of the quilt)! It’s somewhat eclectic, but quick to make as a sampler, and a great way to use up bits and pieces of fabric that languish in every quilter’s stash.
Started just three weeks ago, I have just finished a mammoth session of hand-binding and have just the label to do to complete this superking size quilt (100″x84″) featuring Lewis & Irene’s Fabulous Forties Honey Meadow Fabric Roll for the centre panel, and yards of finest calico for the rest. I’ve learnt how to use Electric Quilt 7 for designing, how to make pintucks, make sure that I have the right machine needle for the top thread to avoid constant breakages, and that I really should have bought the 16″ long arm quilter I was drooling over at the NEC Hobbycraft show last week! I’ve also learnt that measuring twice and cutting once holds just as true for quilters as for carpenters! I hope to have a pattern sorted for the panel soon – I’ll add the link to this page when it’s ready 🙂
Ok, coming in at 15″x20″ this quilt is no where near a yard in size, but it is certainly made from scrap pieces of fabric that every quilter has in their stash (insisting they will come in useful at some point). I sort of made up my own rules to get all the scraps in place with a minimum of pressing or planning, before backing and binding it. It’s taken about 7 hours to make from start to finish.
I’ll be teaching my method at Quorn Country Crafts on Friday, 19th June, 2015 between 10-4pm – feel free to join the waiting list as apparently the initial class is already booked up!
Notwithstanding a minor burn injury caused by not having my arm far enough away from the iron whilst folding the binding for this quilt, I’ve finished my sampler quilt for the workshop I am running at Quorn Country Crafts in Loughborough on 17th April. As you can see, it’s a nine 10×10″ panel quilt-as-you-go with contrast joining strips featuring continuous line free motion quilt patterns that I have adapted from my tangle patterns.