Quilt No. 026: Rotating Squares

Posted on 18th November 2019 by perfectly4med

I made this quilt back in June and was due to teach it this weekend. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough people signed up for the workshop and the session has been cancelled. This frees me up to share the quilt, and more importantly, the pattern!

It is my own design and pattern. If you’d like to buy a copy (£5), click the button below. You will be shown a download link on completion of the order. The link will also be emailed to you with your invoice – if you don’t receive it, please check your spam folder. The file format is a PDF.

By clicking on the download button, you acknowledge that once you have paid you are not entitled to cancel the order or receive a refund (Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 – digital downloads). Continue reading →

Quilt No. 23: Christmas Swirl

Posted on 25th October 2018 by perfectly4med

I’m on a roll… or should that be a bolt (of fabric)? This table runner was surprisingly quick to make and quilt. I took a couple of gratuitous shortcuts, such as daring not to baste the quilt sandwich together and merely relying on a firm press with a hot iron to keep everything together. I got away with it.

The quilt itself is made up of numerous 60° triangles with intervening diamonds, all cut from strips of stripes. The finished runner is quite long at 84″ and is 13″ wide. It traverses the length of our dining table with a small overhang at each end. Quilting was quick and simple stitch-in-the-ditch along the diagonals emphasising the diamond shapes.

The fabric is by Northcott and was obtained in Canmore, Canda whilst we were on hols. The pattern was called Triangle Frenzy Swirl and purchased on our previous USA trip two years ago.

Tiling a tangled pattern

Posted on 25th June 2015 by perfectly4med

Ever had one of those moments where you’re half way through a project and wondering why on earth you started at the scale/level of detail/size of page that you did? This one is a case in point. I have wanted to have a personalised pattern on the background of my blog page for some time now, and decided to draw one in pen and ink. I wanted it to tile perfectly so that it would scroll with the page, and I did it the old fashioned way

Take a sheet of paper, and start your pattern, drawing to the edge of the sheet, but not over it. Then slice it into quarters. Eeek.

Rotate each quarter so that the inside corner now points to the outside, and stick back together on the underside. I used 160gsm card to help with the lining up, but as you can see, my cutting wasn’t all that accurate… it still worked out though.

Fill in the rest of the page, again not allowing any new drawing to go over the edges. This piece is 21cm square in real life, and drawn with a Lamy Safari fountain pen with extra fine nib using Noodler’s Bulletproof Black Ink. It took around 6 hours to do.

I then scanned in the image at high resolution, tidied up the image in Photoshop a little (mainly removing evidence of the cut edges) and it was all done. The final ’tile’ looks like this:

And just to prove it tiles nicely, here’s a sample roughly 5 wide and 2 tall…

And for my next trick, I’ll be adding some colour digitally 🙂
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Chocolate & Teal Puzzle Quilt Pattern

Posted on 24th February 2015 by perfectly4med

Just a quick note to say that my very popular Chocolate & Teal Puzzle Quilt now has a pattern available to download from my original post.

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Autumn Lily Layer Cake Quilt

Posted on 22nd February 2015 by perfectly4med

I finished a mammoth quilt last week, the first I have designed using a Layer Cake – Blackbird Designs ‘Autumn Lily’ by Moda. For the uninitiated, layer cakes are usually forty two 10×10″ pre-cut squares of fabric from a coordinating collection. I augmented this with a lot of calico to make a relatively inexpensive throw for the bed – it reaches over the sides, but only goes 2/3rds of the way up the bed by design (and by the fact that I would have needed more patterned fabric!). Each block in the above photo is just under 10″ square for a sense of scale, and the finished quilt size is 110″x67″ (roughly 3m by 1.5m). Each square has been quilted, and the repeating motif is my own continuous line quilting design.

I spent yesterday afternoon having my first play with Electric Quilt 7 – a quilting software package that I purchased last week to aid in production of quilt patterns, as well as designing my own quilts. As all the reviews I looked at have said, there’s a steep learning curve, but the help screens and tutorial videos do help you get to grips with what is actually an unintuitive interface (at least at first). It does have the benefit of being able to import photos of the fabric swatches, and Moda are kind enough to provide these as a download via their website.

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70’s Cup A: a tangle pattern

Posted on 1st February 2015 by perfectly4med

It’s been a long while since I’ve found inspiration for some more tangle patterns… but this week, while doing a house clearance, I came across a small earthenware cup with geometric patterns reminiscent of those from the 1970’s. This is the first of two tangle patterns based on the cup.