Tag Archives: quilting

Tilted Star – a quilt for a new family member

12 Saturday Aug 2017

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I don’t consider myself a quilter, I’m not nearly passionate enough about it for that, but I have been known to knock out the odd quilt when a special occasion demands one. Major birthdays, weddings and so on. So a quilt was definitely required to mark the arrival of an addition to the family.

I picked up a couple of books from the library with fairly modern designs, and settled on a ’tilted star’ block from a book called Vintage Quilt Revival by Katie Blakesley, published by Interweave.

I knew the nursery colour scheme was to be grey with touches of yellow and aqua, so I raided all the local fabric shops for those colours in prints vaguely suitable for a baby, along with a backing, border and white for the ground around the stars. I was quite pleased to find the white, since it has little baby feet printed on it, they are also white so don’t show up unless you look really closely, but I felt it was a nice touch.

The book suggests making this blog using a paper template and foundation piecing, but I looked at the design and decided that I could do it by cutting shapes and stitching them together, and it would be simpler. I’m guessing that the suggestion to use foundation piecing came about because lots of the joins are on the bias, and using paper adds stability and helps to stop stretching. However, by being careful and using the walking foot on my machine I managed to do a reasonable job. Some of the points of the stars don’t quite line up with edges of the squares, but the inaccuracies are within my tolerance range.

Quilt detail

One thing I did, which would have been less likely if I’d done foundation piecing, was to cut quite a few of the triangles the wrong way round. Some of them are symmetrical, and it didn’t matter which way round they were, but the longer ones are asymmetrical, and I have quite a few left over which I couldn’t use because I had cut them wrong. Also, because I bought more fabric than I needed, I have added to my stash of quilting fabric yet again!

I also changed the design a little, deciding to add sashing in between each of the blocks to make the stars more distinct, as otherwise I felt they all ran into each other rather.

Tilted star baby quilt

Since piecing the front of the quilt was quite complicated, I decided to make the quilting itself simpler (just to make things easier for myself really). I chose a cotton batting, which needed quilting only every 6 inches or so, so my quilting design is just freehand wavy lines drawn along the length of the quilt, about 3 or 4 inches apart. That part of the project went very quickly, and I think it looks good.
I wanted a wide binding for this quilt, I think that frames the quilt nicely, but in the past when I’ve tried I’ve got into real trouble with mitering the corners. This time I found a tutorial on Youtube which explains it well, the secret is that you need extra fabric to allow for the width of the binding. Sadly I can’t now find the tutorial, but I did take one photo to remind myself of the technique.

Quilt binding detail

Finally, I added a label to the back of the quilt, with the baby’s name, date of birth, and other details. I think it’s really important to add this information to quilts since it’s an important historical record for so many antique quilts, although I must admit that in these days of digital photos, social media and other information sharing and recording methods, it might be a bit of an anomaly. It makes me happy anyway, how about you?

Tricky Corners

29 Thursday Jan 2015

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I’ve been making a quilt for my daughter, to mark the occasion of her moving into her own place. A kind of housewarming quilt, based on the log cabin pattern, which I believe was traditionally used for such quilts. It was also partly inspired by a quilt I saw in the book East Quilts West, by Kumiko Sudo. I’m pleased with the way the top came together, and the quilting, which I did freehand with the machine. And I must have got the basting pretty right too, since I got no wrinkles at all when I did the quilting. When I came to the binding though, a different story!

I wanted to do a double fold bias binding, at least I think that’s what it’s called, and I went straight to the first tutorial I found – How to bind a quilt with mitred corners and invisible joins, by MadebyMarzipan. It looked straightforward, so off I went.

I cut the binding, joined the strips, pressed, and stitched all around the edges of the quilt, all eight metres of it. Then I sat down to hand stitch the folded edge in place. I was still going well until I reached the first corner. It’s a disaster. I’m not sure why, but mine doesn’t look anything like the video. The only explanation I can think of is that I chose to make a wider border, about one inch wide finished, whereas the video shows a much narrower binding. I didn’t think it would make a difference, but apparently it does. So, my corners look more like the ends of rugby balls than neatly mitred corners. As usual, I was trying to get the quilt finished at the last minute, and no way was I going to unpick all eight metres of binding to try a different way, so the corners have stayed like rugby balls.

Next time, if I ever make another quilt, I will try the binding out on a practice piece first, to make sure that the corners will work. I might even have a go with strips of paper, since I’m sure it’s got to be a principle of geometry that has let me down. But I find it really hard to envisage without actually doing it.

Other than the corners, the quilt was a success, and well received. I was so last minute in finishing it that I haven’t yet taken any pictures, but when I do, I sure won’t be including the corners!

Another thing which I did photograph, because it came out pretty well, was a Thermomix cover I made, again for the same daughter. I had found some fabric which goes with her monochrome apartment, and also her love of travel, so here it is.

Thermomix cover

Thermomix cover

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Interior, I went with a splash of colour here.

I used a pattern I bought online, from The Pattern Emporium. I’m pretty pleased with it, but a Thermomix is obviously bigger than I thought. The pattern says that it will fit an average overlocker as well, so perhaps when I get my sewing space organised I’ll make matching covers for my machine and overlocker. It also has useful pockets on the sides for accessories etc., which is another idea worth pursuing.

 

Christmas trees and Christmas lilies

27 Thursday Dec 2012

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Well, Christmas half over. We had celebrations with part of the family on the day itself, and will get together with other family on Saturday. Nothing like spreading the holiday out for as long as possible! Plus, since we haven’t had either gathering at my house I haven’t had to do very much apart from make food to take.
I’ve been making a Christmas tree table decoration out of quilt fabric to take on Saturday, from a picture sent to me by my aunt in England. She’s been making them to sell at a charity bazaar to raise funds for the local hospice. Mine isn’t quite finished yet, I’ll post a photo when it is, but I found a few examples of similar ones on the web.
One being sold on Etsy, here,
and a tutorial to make something similar here.
Since I don’t know where my aunt got the idea from I can’t credit the original designer, but they seem to be fairly common so perhaps lots of people had the same idea. My Google search also turned up some other interesting ideas, which I should put to one side and think about before next Christmas – how likely is that to actually happen!
A photo for now, the lily bulbs I planted in the spring are now flowering beautifully. They are Lilium longiflorum I think, known in Australia and possibly other places as Christmas lilies for fairly obvious reasons. I am really impressed with these, the bulbs I bought were a really good size, so I had high hopes, and they are certainly living up to it. The bulbs came from a place called Tulips with a Difference, in South West WA, and here is one of the flowers.

lily

Quilt completed

02 Monday Jan 2012

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I finished the quilt I have been making for my Dad, which was supposed to be for his 85th birthday at the beginning of December, but didn’t get done in time. I went to see them on the day after Boxing Day, and gave it to him then instead. Of course he was kind enough to be very pleased with it, but I have to admit I was quite pleased with it myself.

I bought the fabrics for the quilt top online, by searching for ‘quilt fabric’ and ‘bugs’, since I wanted nature inspired designs. I ended up buying from two different places, www.eQuilter.com and www.bugfabric.com. The only thing I did wrong was to not pay enough attention to the scale of the design on the fabric. Most sites do tell you how many inches across the motif is, or something similar, and I didn’t look at that and got a couple of patterns which were really a bit too big. Still, in the end they all worked in together. I also have this strong feeling that one shouldn’t be too precious about putting together fabrics for a quilt, after all it is a craft which began as a way of using up scraps left over, and recycling old clothes and linen. The idea of going out to buy completely new fabric, cut it into small pieces and then sew them all back together again is not quite in the true spirit of the thing to my mind.

Anyway, here is the finished article

Dad's quilt

Dad's quilt

It should actually be hanging short side at the top, portrait format rather than landscape. But since I left taking photos of it until the last minute I didn’t have any other easy way of hanging it except on the clothes line. The big butterflies are hand appliqued, the rest is machine pieced and quilted.

A closer look

closer lookI was particularly pleased with the spider web fabric, since when my kids were little one of their favourite books for Grandad to read to them was a book about a spider, called Wolfie, by Janet Chenery and Mark Simont. I found a pdf version here just now, and had a little moment of nostalgia.

On the subject of quilting being a make-do-and-mend type of activity, I have decided to start another quilt using the English patchwork technique. My mother did one many years ago, and I’m going to do likewise. The idea is to use up all the little bits I have left over from years of other projects, at least all the cotton bits. Other quilts, the girls’ clothes, my clothes, clothes made for other people, you get the idea. I’ve started making hexagons and am putting them all in a box to sew together when I start to have enough. Another thing that this technique uses up is junk mail, and advertising material, since a lot of it is printed on slightly heavier than normal paper. It is really satisfying to cut up the little booklet of ‘changed terms and conditions’ which comes with the bank statement, or the flier in the mail from our local politician. Finally a use for all that stuff!

The rythym of words

23 Friday Dec 2011

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Listening to the televison last night, not watching as I was in the next room. The sound was turned low so I couldn’t hear what was being said, but found myself listening to the rythym of speech. The show was a comedy, American I think, with audience, canned, laughter. I found that I could almost anticipate when the pause for laughter would come. There were two male characters, and although I could not hear the words and did not know which lines were going to be funny, there was a rhythm to it. If conversation is like a game of tennis, where the speech gets hit back and forth between two people, then this was like a game of tennis where every few strokes the ball goes into the audience. By laughing, the studio audience showed that they had understood, and were supportive. They tossed the ball back to the players so that they could continue.
I have also been reading recently The Little Red Book of Writing, by Mark Tredinnick, and he speaks about the rhythm of writing. Read your work out loud, he says, so that you can tell if it flows, or is stilted and unnatural. The best writing is like speech, only you have practiced it and polished it until it has rhythm. I think this is something I have generally done anyway, but it makes sense, and I shall certainly make a point of doing it in future.
I finished Dad’s quilt this morning, the last step being to stitch on a label. I included his name, where he lives, the occasion the quilt was made for (being careful to say given for, not on, since I have missed his birthday by almost a month). I bought a laundry marker to write the label with, a Pilot one here, which is supposed to have a point made especially for writing on fabric, and it is certainly much better for the purpose than a normal permanent marker, which is what I have used in the past. The only remaining thing is to take photos, which I will do tomorrow, and then give it to him. I’ll post photos here too.

Lessons Learnt whilst Making a quilt

13 Tuesday Dec 2011

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I’ve been making a quilt for my Dad, since it’s his 85th birthday. I ordered the fabric online months ago, choosing patterns from nature. There are butterflies, bees, dragonflies, birds, trees and leaves, and one fabric is tree bark. Dad is and always has been a lover of nature. I got the top pieced quite successfully, and this week started to put it together with the batting and the backing.

I laid it out on the biggest table I have, since it’s not a big quilt, only single bed size. Designed more as a lap quilt or knee rug than anything else. I had to join the backing, so I did that first and laid it on the table, then the batting on top. I used Warm & Safe,  a rather advanced batting from America which is made of sustainably grown trees (more nature) and is also rated as being fire retardant, which I thought was a plus. It comes from The Warm Company, but this particular product doesn’t seem to be on their website yet. Then I put the quilt top over that, and smoothed it all out.

I’d decided to pin baste rather than thread baste, and used as many safety pins as I had. Then I took the quilt to the machine and started to quilt. Nothing fancy, just quilting round the edge of some of the blocks to start with. I had done maybe a third of what I intended to do, then got too tired and went to bed. Next morning I laid the quilt back out on the table. Disaster! What I thought was a nice reasonably smooth job looked shocking, with more wrinkles than a Shar-pei puppy. Nothing for it but to indulge in a spot of reverse sewing and start again.

This time I thread basted, lines of long stitches about four inches apart over all the quilt. Then I looked on the web for any hints as to how to get a reasonably good result. This was one of the best pages I found. Put the sewing machine on a bigger table was first, with clear space all round, and so that the weight of the quilt would be supported and not dragging against the needle. Closer basting also helped, other things I could have done but didn’t include spraying the table with a silicone based furniture polish to help the fabric move over the table evenly, wearing gloves so that I could manoeuvre the fabric better, and making an extension to the sewing machine bed so that I had a bigger flat area to work on. I decided to try without all these things since I don’t quilt often (actually I think this is only the second time). The furniture polish I would have done except I didn’t have any and it was Sunday.

Then, with some trepidation (I’d already done enough reverse sewing for one project) I started again. This time I’m pleased to say that the result was satisfactory, although more practice might have improved it a bit. Now all I have to do is add the binding, and the quilt is done. Oh, and I need to remember to take a picture of it when it is finished.

I titled this post Lessons Learned Whilst Making a Quilt, and I bet you can guess what the lessons were! As with almost everything in life, preparation is the key to good results, isn’t that boring?

Op-shop couture

06 Thursday Oct 2011

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I started looking for reconstructed and upcycled clothing on the net, and never dreamed how many hits I’d get. So many people are recycling clothing into all sorts of new fashions, and most of them are way more innovative than I would be. Try Googling reconstructed clothing, or recycled clothing, and you will find all sorts of inspiration. There are things to buy from other people, and ideas for things to make yourself.

I wanted a new outfit to wear to the editing workshop, and decided to create one myself out of op shop clothing. I’ve shopped op shops for years, first out of necessity when money was very tight, and more recently from not wanting to be a conspicuous consumer. It doesn’t hurt that it can still be way cheaper!

I went op shopping, and challenged myself to find what I needed in just one shop. Eventually I came away with one black top, one patterned, and one plain which picks up the colours of the pattern. I feel I ought to call the colour apricot, or salmon, but really I guess it’s orange! These are the tops.

The black one is going to be the base, I’m able to get into it but it’s a little tight, so I plan to cut it apart, and use the other two tops as decorative ways to put it back together again. Also I’ll lower the neck a bit, so I can wear another plain top underneath it, with sleeves for warmth. I really like some of the upmarket fashion labels I’ve seen in stores, with asymmetric clothes, and each garment having three or four different fabrics in it. Like these at TS14Plus clothes, and these Koos van den Akker designs from the Vogue pattern catalogue. I also did an image search on Google for Koos van den Akker, and came up with lots of ideas, although the flamboyance quotient of most of them is too high for me. Browsing through the images led me to several blogs of other admirers of his work, and eventually to the book, Couture Collage, which I am teetering on the brink of buying.

I’m hoping to end up with something inspired by these images, without the price tag. My base garments cost me $11.50 altogether.

I started by cutting down the front of the black top, on a diagonal line. Then I cut a strip of the pattern fabric to finish the raw edge at the neck. I cut pieces of both fabrics and pieced them together to fill the gap between the two edges of the black top. Next step was to try it on, and I found that I had cut a little too far, and the V of the neckline was a bit low. I needed to construct something to put in to fill the space.

As often happens, inspiration came from nowhere in particular, or more accurately from one of my quilting books which was lying on the table. I decided to make a small patchwork square to stitch over the gap. I made a kind of uneven log cabin block, starting with a triangle instead of a square, but cut the finished block to a square, so it is completely asymmetrical. The finished square was a bit unruly in terms of having nice straight edges and corners, so I stitched it right sides together with a scrap of black lining, then turned it right side out. I think the technique is called ‘bagging out’ in the trade.

This little exercise highlighted how much easier it would be to do this kind of garment construction with a dress form. I’ve never had one, and never really felt the need, but when you are making the garment up as you go along I think it would be really useful to have something to put it on so you could see how it was shaping up, literally. I shall have to look out for a second hand one, as they are pretty expensive new. I know there are ways of making your own custom fit, but I don’t feel like investing the time at the moment, and mostly I’m not looking for a perfect fit in these garments.

Having fixed up the neckline I had only to stitch the lower part of the orange top around to the lining of the base black top. The orange top already had a nice lettuce edge on it, and because it was a wrap style with two layers at the front there was enough of the edge to go all the way around the hem of the black top. A bit of finishing off, and done, albeit at 7.30 on the morning of the workshop!

I was pleased with it. When I came home, however, the blonde dog was so pleased to see me that she jumped up and caught one of her claws in the slightly lacy black fabric, and made a hole in it. Next time I wear the top it will have either a contrast patch, or possibly a pocket added to it! It’s also occurred to me that maybe I should create some printed or woven labels to sew into my own constructions – another side project. If I’m going to keep posting pictures I need to make an effort to take better ones too.

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Recycled reconstructed upcycled clothes Koos van den Akker Vogue TS 14 plus op shop design asymmetrical quilting