Tuesday 21 October 2014

Does three constitute a herd?

This pattern is just too easy to pass up when needing to make a few softies in a short time.



I added rattles into these ones again - a small plastic canister partially filled with some beads stuffed in amidst all the polyester stuffing.
As these ones were all going to baby babies I also went with felt eyes - & added these on with free motion embroidery before sewing the elephant body together. Super quick & easy!


Addition - last night I saw some of these elephants made from the EXACT SAME pattern for sale...for $44!! Wow.....



Saturday 18 October 2014

Bungle Jungle plus elephants quilt is finished


The Bungle Jungle Pieced quilt is finished. My first ‘commission’! 
They chose the pattern, I adjusted the size and layout slightly to fit what we needed. The finished size of 41” x 58” is a bit bigger than a standard baby quilt and that is because there are going to be two babies in this instance – twins are on the way!

They provided the initial red and blue fabrics and wanted a quilt for the babies that included elephants but wasn’t too “baby”.  The patterned and elephant Moda Bungle Jungle prints I had in my stash worked in really well with what they had already selected.The size of the blocks are 7.5” square when finished and the internal grey sashing is 1” finished.

And this is how it turned out.

The back was a single piece of patterned fabric which worked out perfectly – I sized the quilt so that the width matched the backing, so no cutting /seams required.

I tried a few new things. Cotton batting instead of polyester…and I am not sure I will be going back to polyester . The cotton was sooooooooo much easier to quilt.

I also left the “Button” (sewing) room to do the quilting this time around. I love my Button room, but the space on the dining room table is so much clearer for manoeuvring while quilting, so this is the new Quilting Venue from here on in. This is how I set myself up:




I also worked out that to get a proper 1/4" seam I need to move my needle a few stops over to the right using the settings on my machine. I used a quilters ruler to measure and mark a line on my machine using blue painters tape to further assist keeping to a nice even quarter inch.




Here is another, very different Bungle Jungle Moda print quilt of mine


Saturday 11 October 2014

quilting works in progress...

I have many quilts I want to make, some of them I've been thinking about for a while and others are more recent plannings. I've been playing with fabrics to help solidify what the final quilts might look like.

Here are a few sneek peaks.
This one will be for Little Imp. It will require a bit of precision piecing, and it will be the biggest quilt I've made....maybe that is why I haven't started it yet other than to cut out lots and lots of rectangles.



This one will be our new picnic rug. I am tossing up between going with a half square triangle light/dark pattern, or using instead using a plain dark green plain fabric along with the patterned to make something more along the lines of these half square triangle cushions.




And then this one is the current undertaking. For a new little baby. A log cabin quilt. Fun.



Tuesday 7 October 2014

Granny's paper pieced quilt

When I was a young girl my granny Harris hand pieced each of her 3 grand daughters a hexagonal patterned quilt. I still have mine today, although it is a bit smaller than it used to be as I cut away a few badly stained rows at one end and re did the binding.



I remember helping her a little. Using old travel brochures as the piecing paper and making piles of the little hexagonal templates granny needed. A bigger template was used to trace around and make the fabric hexagons. I’m sure I barely touched the sides, but I also remember spending time tacking the fabric onto the paper to make fabric hexagon piles for granny to then start stitching together. By hand.

  

Each hexagon flower with its white border needs 37 individual paper pieced pieces. A quick count of these plus the blue joiners gets me to close to 4500 hexagons!
A Huge Undertaking!


Thank you so much granny for the amazing love you stitched into my quilt. xxx