Flat 36

This quilt is inspired by a doorbell panel on a block of flats. I saw a photo somewhere and the image just stuck in my mind. The doorbells had obviously all been identical, but over time some buttons had become stained with nicotin, scribbled on with felt tips or replaced with buttons of other colours. The diversity in the nametags also told its own story about the change the place had seen over the years.

I made a quick sketch of one doorbell in my notebook at the time, and added the information that there were 4 x 9 doorbells and I promptly forgot about it. Ages later I came across my sketch and sat down to work out the proportions of the block in EQ before leaving it to stew for a while. Earlier this summer, I decided it was time to do something about it and I started pulling fabrics from my stash. Initially I thought about writing or embroidering names, but I decided to go more abstract and just use fabrics with random text on them instead (somehow my stash seems to have oodles of chatty fabric...) after all, this quilt is only a doorbell quilt because I say so, it could just as easily be an abstract arrangement of squares, rectangles and strips.

Anyhow... Once I started, the top went together quite quickly, but the quilting took a while. I decided on an allover pattern, and quilted a wavy line across the quilt and a big dart in  from the top and from the bottom before filling in the space with echoing lines. By the time I had filled in the empty spaces I had realized that the lines were too far apart, so there was nothing for it - I just had to double the amiunt if quilting by adding new quilting lines in between the ones already there. I think it was worth the effort though, and for a wall quilt, that amount of quilting works quite well.

I used a remnant of a great IKEA house fabric for the backing. Finished size of the quilt: 39x32"

Polka dots and more

I must confess to a little retail therapy ;-) I seem to be really drawn to polka dots recently, and although I have made two red and aqua quilts already, I just couldn't resist these. Now, what do I make from them? Any suggestions? There is a length of solid Kona in Sand there as well - I'm slowly but surely adding to my stash of solids and I just got myself the colour card from Kona. There are almost too many lovely colours to choose from!

I thought I might as well start getting ready for Christmas as well. Not really, but who could resist these beauties from Sweetwater? Placemats from these, I think.

And Tula Pink's Prince Charming line in Indigo was way too tempting. An unusual colourway for me, but with the right solid to set them off they will be great, I think. I really love the one with the silhouettes on top of the pile there - I might get that in an other colourway as well...

These birdy, collage like fabrics are just so lovely, but hard to cut into - maybe pillows or totebags? And I also found some lovely yellow polkadot fabric from Sweetwater at reduced price.

I added these great buildings as well. I'm thinking that the windows on the fabric on the left also could be appliqued onto a house block of some sort - I might have fun playing with that! The black and white with sewing notions on the right is one I won at a guild meeting.
Wow, I didn't think I had bought that much fabric lately, but seen all together here, there is quite a lot of it. It's a good thing my holidays have just started - it's time to sew!

All decided - more work ahead

When in doubt, make a mug rug. That's what I did to come to a decision about my quilting lines. I stitched some of the leftover bits and pieces from the quilt top together and started making a mug rug. First I quilted it all in parallell(ish) lines using the same distance as on my quilt. Then I started stitching in between the lines. You can see the tighter quilting here, on the right hand side. Much better, I think. That means that I still have lots of work ahead of me, but I will be far happier with the outcome, I believe. And what's the rush anyway?

Anybody in?

I'm contemplating titles for my new quilt, and "Anybody in?" is one of the options. You  might have to see the whole thing to get why?  Can you see what inspired it from this glimpse?

I'm halfway through quilting it - or am I? I'm beginning to wonder if the quilting lines are too far apart - maybe I should add new ones in between? It will be very compact if I do, but it is meant to be a wall quilt, so that doesn't really matter. I've gathered some of the off-cuts to make a mug rug where I can try out the tighter quilting before I decide.

Working

I've been incredibly slack when it comes to blogging lately, but in case somebody's still out there - I'm alive and well. A blurry picture attests to the fact that I'm actually working on something as well, but more about that in my next post.
This morning has been given entirely over to housework - days and weeks of rain could have been spent doing all those chores instead of moping around wondering if this summer will ever start, but wouldn't you know it: today the sun is shining and here I am busy hoovering and washing... Well, doing the laundry makes sense on a day free of rain and with a gentle breeze to help the drying process, I suppose, and my energy levels are much higher on a bright day, which helps in getting the work done quickly.
I've still got two weeks left at work before my summer really starts, so now's the time to get everything in order so I can really enjoy it. I need to sort out some craft projects, some fabric is making it's way here through the mail and I have a pile of books to enjoy, so although I'm staying at home the entire three weeks, they will fly by in a blur once I get there, I believe. I can hardly wait! Now if I could only talk the sun into staying put for a while...

Pinned

I joined Pinterest a while ago to gather inspiration for Project Spectrum, but before I knew it I had also gathered followers, started following others and created several new boards. I have found it a good way of keeping track of quilty inspiration as well. My pinboard for quilts is eclectic, I suppose, as I have gathered some old favourites along with new ones that catch my eye on my journeys through the blogosphere (doesn't that sound like a Sci-Fi adventure? "Journeys Through the Blogosphere"? LOL). Anyway, weave your way through the different quilty boards there and there is plenty of inspiration. Just remember to save some time for the actual sewing too ;-)

And for sewing one needs fabric - did I mention that you can pin favourite fabric as well? You are hereby warned...

More pillow talk

 My old sofa pillows were looking a bit tired, so it was time for a change. I had a piece of gorgeous turquoise brocade which looked quite good next to a turquoise linen. I really like the different textures here. I also had some felt in the same colour, but decided that it was too much, so I kept it simple and used only these two. I used my largest yoyo-maker to make a brocade yoyo and found a gold button in my stash for the perfect finish.

For the back I used this great method again - it just comes together so easily that it has soon become my perfect go-to method of adding a zipper to the back of a pillow.

 The other pillow is quite different. It uses the same linen as the other one for the background, but here I added double sided strips of fabric stitched on to the backing along the middle of each strip. After finishing the pillow I tacked the strips together here and there with contrasting stitches of cotton floss. I used fabric from a pillow I made earlier and some of my precious Authentic strips, so that everything will tie in together eventually.

I used a newsprint fabric for the back of this one - nice to have something to read before taking a nap ;-)

Red and green

 No, it's not Christmas. I'm just a little late with my Project Spectrum project for May. Not a huge thing, just another mug rug. I just grabbed some scraps and stitched them together, cutting some gentle curves and slanted stitching lines. I included a green strip for interest and quilted it with green thread. The binding is from my jar of leftover binding scraps. The red one was too short, so I included a multi-coloured piece as well.

While I was in full swing, I might as well continue with June and a green mug rug as well. For this one I cut four rectangles of the light green and added strips randomly at both sides, leaving a strip of the green foundation in the middle. The rectangles were trimmed and stitched together and I quilted a spirally diamond from the middle.
I will keep looking for green inspiration throughout the month, before I start concentrating on blues for July.

Green inspiration

Some green inspiration to share today. I have been pinning green images to keep in the Project Spectrum spirit, where June is the green month. I had lots of ideas for May, but didn't actually get round to starting a red project until the very last day. I still have a bit of binding to stitch, before I disclose the result - a whole mug rug! Not much, I know, but still... And today I actually made a green one as well, so with a bit of hand stitching tonight I might just have something to show you tomorrow!

Flower picture

Grow, a photo by crafty mathea on Flickr.

I was inspired by a technique in Quilting Arts Magazine and had to give it a go. I used some Sweetwater fabric with appropriate words like 'sunshine', 'plant' and 'grow' for the background and quilted it with parallel lines before adding the flowers. They are just stacks of free cut fabric circles in different sizes with flower sketches stitched by machine on top in black thread. This was just a small experiment (8 x 12") so I finished it off quickly with a zigzag stitch round the edge.
I quite like the effect of the black stitching doing it's own thing with splotches of colour in the background, so this is definitely a technique to add to my toolbox for future use. Fun!

Laptop bag

I've been so busy visiting other bloggers lately, due to the Festival, that I have neglected to show you my new bag. Ever since I got my laptop last autumn I have been meaning to make a bag to carry it around in, but it took a while to find the right pattern. I found the right fabrics soon enough - bikes and buses seemed the right images for something that will be on the move a lot, so my Echino fabrics were my first choice, making this a very colourful bag. I had half yards of both bike and bus prints and of two polka dot prints in brown/aqua and aqua/brown. It turned out that it wasn't quite enough though, so I had to dip into my Ruby Star Rising stash as well, using the retro radio print for the inside of the flap and inner pockets. The fabric weight is the same, making it a good match.
I used the Cambridge Cargo Bag pattern by Lila Tueller for this bag, but  made it even sturdier by using two layers of thin batting and quilting all the outside pieces before assembling, making a protective outer layer.

The bag has two inner pocket panels, each divided into three, making six pockets inside in addition to the two cargo pockets on the outside, so I will get room for a lot of bits and pieces. While cutting the panels for the pockets I decided not to trim off the selvedges, but rather to keep them as a decorative element inside the bag. They might collect a bit of lint in the long run, but I'll learn to live with that, as I quite like the effect :-)

I took advantage of the differently patterned areas of the fabrics to cut separate pieces for the bag - for instance, I used one aqua/turquoise stripe to make the closure-strap,matching the stripe along the back of the flap. I also used a green polka dotted area of the bus fabric for the side panels, matching the greens squares on the bike fabric. All in all, cutting the different pieces and deciding what was to go where, and how best to utilize the fabric, took some thinking and planning, but that was half the fun of planning this bag. Now, the bag has magnetic closures, something I didn't give a second thought until it was nearly finished, but according to some intensive googling, bag magnets are considered too weak to do any harm to computers. Let's hope they are right!

Quilt Festival time

Some of us can only dream about going to Market, and live vicariously through those who do, catching tantalizing glimpses of new fabric lines and patterns as they appear in various blogs and albums online. What a joy it is to be able to take part in the Bloggers' Quilt Festival for those of us who stay at home. Thank you Amy for taking the time to organize this again!

My entry this time is a quilt I named 'Authentic 2 by 4'. I managed to snag a Jelly Roll of Authentic by Sweetwater before it was too late, knowing the letters and numbers would be great in collages and as accents in quilts here and there. When I saw all the fabrics together, I felt that it would be a shame to separate them, and I kept wanting to sort them by pattern and colour. Rearranging precuts with their zigzaggy edges is very messy though, leaving you with lots of lint everywhere.

My idea for a sampler, using the entire line came from Jane Brocket's book "The Gentle Art of Quilt-Making". You wouldn't know it by looking at it, because her quilt is entirely different - all triangles, I seem to remember (too lazy to get up and check it...). It wasn't so much the quilt itself though, as her description of her inspiration for the quilt - samples from a haberdashery - which triggered the idea. When I was a kid we had a large department store in town with what I remember as a huge fabric and haberdashery department on the ground floor. You could browse through their selection of buttons mounted in squares on large boards. I used to love going there with my mum and my auntie, who was a seamstress, and browse furtively through the boards while the grown-ups were busy with their purchases. Funny how such memories can pop up from a hidden drawer in your mind when you get a little trigger such as Jane's description of her inspiration. Once I thought about that, I knew that I too wanted to make a sampler board. Knowing that my fabric strips were 2 1/2", I knew that triangles would be too small to show off the fabrics properly. I decided on rectangles, 2 x 4" finished size (hence the title) and used a natural cotton linen blend for the sashing.

I found a piece of rather loosely woven curtain fabric with a handwriting print for the backing and used parallell lines for the quilting. It is a fairly small and simple quilt, quite easy to make, but it has become one of my favourites. The neutral tones makes it fit in anywhere, and knowing that I have a sample of each and every one of the prints in the collection makes it much easier to cut into those strips in the remainder of the jelly roll and use them elsewhere.

That's my entry for the Festival, now make sure to visit Bloggers' Quilt Festival and see all the lovely quilts there! 

It's that time again

Project Spectrum is starting up again after a long break. I love that we are back to focusing on single colours this time,so we can scoot off in any direction we like.
I have no idea of what I want to make yet, but I guess it will be something quilt-related. I'm going to use some time to focus on the first colour - red - and gather inspiration first, and no doubt, an idea will pop into my head after a while. I love how such prompts as sticking to a certain colour or theme can take you off on paths you otherwise wouldn't have followed. What a perfect way to discover new things and learn something about your own likes and dislikes!

In order to keep track of the colours, I have made a simple little colour calendar - feel free to use it if you like. And the Project Spectrum logo in the sidebar will take you straight to the Flickr pool to see what everybody else is doing.

Little boxes



I needed to make some small sewing related party favours for my guild. Because I haven't got a quilt shop nearby and time was at a premium, the only thing I could get my hands on in time was spools of thread. That's fine, something every quilter needs, but maybe slightly boring, so I decided to spend some extra effort on presentation. I made origami boxes from 6 x 6" squares of scrapbook paper and came up with these little flowers to decorate them: circles in three different sizes with slits cut in them. I rolled the edges slightly over a pencil to shape the petals and used flower shaped brads and sequins in the center to attach them to the boxes. The boxes look sweet because they are so tiny, I think - they are only just large enough to fit a spool of thread from corner to corner.

Pastel mug rugs

Pastel mugrugs front, a photo by crafty mathea on Flickr.

Taking part in the Mug Rug Madness I got so many ideas I wanted to try out. The starburst was one of them, and I had a go, using some of my scraps. I used strips and stitched them together at an angle, trimming as I went. When I had finished making the top, I had a lot of leftover wedges of fabric and started stitching them together randomly. A few strips here and there, and before you knew it I had both front and back ready for another mug rug. So there you go, two for the price of one. Of course, when I look back at the mug rug that was the inspiration for mine, it looks nothing like this - I should have made the narrow ends more pointed to get the starburst effect. Maybe next time...
Never mind, they are bright and cheerful, and quickly found a new home. Friends who appreciate the work we do should be rewarded after all ;-)

Disappearing nine-patch

 Ta da! I finally finished this quilt. I was given a pile of blocks from my friends in the guild when I stepped down from office some years ago, and eventually got round to piecing them together some time last year. After the top was finished, it needed to marinate for a while (as these things do), but eventually I got round to finishing it.
I backed it with fleece, and despite careful measuring, I realized while I was basting it that the fleece was a tad too narrow. I didn't really want to cut off any part of the blocks, so I decided to turn the edges over to the back and stitch them in place instead of adding binding. Once that was done, I machine stitched two parallell seams along the edge to finish it off.

The blocks were made using the disappearing nine-patch method. An easy method to make a lot of interest and variety in a quilt. My friends had agreed among themselves on using bright colours combined with black, making all the blocks play well together. A nice and scrappy quilt with fuzzy backing and blocks stitched full of warm wishes - what could be better to snuggle under?

Something new

I have spent so much time finishing old projects lately, that the fun was going all out of it, so it was time to start something new. I got my lovely Echino fabrics out of hiding - they should be out and about being showed off to the rest of the world, so a why not use them for a new bag. Now anyone who has visited this blog before might argue that I have more than enough bags! But the thing is, I haven't got a bag for my computer, so there's my perfect excuse for a new project...
Now, constructing a new bag is hard work, and there has to be some play as well:

Signs of life

 Finally there are little shoots peeping up...

 Honeysuckle leaves are unfurling...

 A few tentative violets are showing up...

But still, it's quite chilly outside, so I'm enjoying a bunch of shop bought tulips indoors while stitching some miles of binding...

More mug rug madness

Inspired by the last weeks of Mug Rug Madness, I couldn't resist whipping up a few more. I picked some of my favourite fabrics from the scrap bag: polka dots, text, numbers and houses. I used a paper piecing pattern of an umbrella for the first one - can you 'spot' it? ;-)

For the other one I used some lovely house scraps from the pillow I made recently. I just stitched pieces together randomly and added a bit of machine quilting and hand stitching.

All that randomness was quite fun, but now I'm ready to try some of those great tutorials from the Mug Rug Madness. Have you seen all the lovely inspiration in the Flickr group?

Not too crazy

It turned out that I wasn't too crazy after all - I actually finished the hand quilting with time to spare, even though the birthday celebration was moved from Sunday too Saturday!

It was fun to work on a quilt with such big pieces and blocks for a change. Each block is 20" square with 1 1/2" sashing, making the quilt 55 x 76 1/2". The pattern is from Fat Quarterly way back in May 2010. I was intrigued by the simple Windowpane blocks and have been playing around with them in EQ ever since. I used fleece on the back to make it a fast and snuggly quilt, which meant that I couldn't quilt it as heavily as I normally would have. An allover quilting pattern would have made the blocks blend in more, but the raspberry machine stitched lines between the blocks go well with the fabrics and so does the grey cotton floss I have used for the big quilting stitches inside the squares, so I quite like the effect anyway.

I used a sage floral print for the binding. I would really have liked to use the Flora and Fauna pink with the bees, but sadly I didn't have enough. Still, a more subtle finish works as well, I think.
The main thing is that my sister was thrilled with it. I had some concerns, because her home is on the "minimalist" end of the scale while mine is more "maximalist"... but this combination of modern florals and neutral gray proved to be just right for her, and she really loved it. She almost pushed us out the door at the end of the evening, because she couldn't wait to snuggle under it ;-) You gotta love that reaction!

My starting point when pulling fabric for this quilt was that lovely "Spotted Owl" print from Alexander Henry. My sister loves owls, so this was just right for her. I must admit I have a soft spot for it myself, and luckily I ordered several yards of it, so I still have something left to make something for myself. Now, what will I make...