I’m trying to do one free motion quilt square per day – it keeps me in practice, doesn’t put too much strain on my dicky wrists, and doesn’t take up too much time. I’ve also started sewing up the squares to see what it’ll look like completed.
As usual, my photography lets me down… but you get the gist. And here’s what the four of them look like bound together:
Happy Christmas to you all 🙂
I’ve been at the sewing machine using one of the many books I got for Christmas – Hari Walner’s Continuous Line Quilting Designs. Featuring 80 designs, it relies on free motion machine stitching, unless you’re doing it by hand of course… I’ve decided to make a sampler quilt since my practice squares have turned out ok. It’ll be just calico and 80/20 wadding – may be a prototype for a silk dupion one? Here’s the first two squares, 10×10″ in size.
I’ve got the sewing bug sooo bad! But that’s ok as it justifies getting the new sewing machine 😉
This afternoon I decided to make myself a stained glass window bag to carry all my quilting paraphernalia to and from future workshops. I didn’t have a pattern to follow, and worked it out as I went – there was only one minor glitch along the way fixing the handles, but got that sorted without too much unpicking. I’ve somehow made it reversible, but who’d want to hide the colour side? After three hours ironing, sewing and cogitating, here’s the results:
And I thought I’d made it big enough – but no, it’s an inch too small (16 inches square) after all the folds and seams were a smidge imprecise. The next one should be quicker 🙂
So buoyed up by my first patchwork quilt, I embarked on my second – and bought a new sewing machine (Pfaff Quilt Expression 4.0) as well! This is a quilt-as-you-go jelly roll rail fence pattern, as described in Popular Patchwork magazine (p.31, September 2011). I chose a batik fabric jelly roll from The Fabric Guild. The binding strips are a Hoffmann print, and the backing a dark brown batik double-width cotton, also from The Fabric Guild. Wadding is 80/20 cotton/polyester.
Apologies for the quality of the image – I’m finding photographing large quilts quite tricky! It is 52×61 inches in size, and is for sale – here’s the listing on eBay!
There’s been a bit of a lull in postings – sorry about that! My creativity has had no such lull, so here’s a quick update of my activities…
I finally finished my first quilt – it’s a Jelly Roll Sampler, made with ‘Grace’ by 3 sisters for Moda. Each block took about an hour to make, with the sashing and border taking an afternoon, the basting and quilting another afternoon and the binding another four hours. I’m rather pleased with the outcome, and it’s now gracing our ‘guest’ sofa 🙂
It took me a while to decide on a quilting pattern, helped by the need to wait for an even feed foot for my 12 year old Singer 1012 to arrive in the post! Here’s a close up:
Next for quilting is another Jelly Roll in brown and grey batiks, made to a quilt-as-you-go pattern. It’ll be a while as I’m making another handbag as a Christmas gift…