Hope Valley - a finished quilt top and some quilt math-

My Hope Valley quilt top is finished and is everything I hoped for. With every square I added to the top it gotten better and better.

Faith's Saddle up pattern was the perfect choice and I am happy to move on to the difficult decision of the quilt back. Lately I have spent way to much time thinking of quilt backs. I am actually contemplating  a solid quilt back for a change but I will probably change my mind a dozend times over the next days.


My quilt is larger than the original from Faith that is 68" as I wanted the finished size to be around 80" square. And because this quilt is done on the diagonal you need to calculate the diagonal width of a square to be able to calculate its overall size.

And the formula for this is:

The diagonal of a square = sqrt(2) x the length (or width) of the square itself

Faiths' squares were 3" finished size which yields a diagonal width of:

sqrt(2) = 1.414 * 3" = 4.242

Now you need to count the squares that are in one row (or column) and the number is 16.
Finally multiply this number by the diagonal width of the single square and you have your overall width of the square quilt which in Faiths' case = 16 x 4.242 = 67.88" so roughly 68"

To size this up to 80" I simply calculated on an excel spreadsheet  a few sizes up from 3" and ended up using a 4" square. It's inished size is 3.5" and by using the above formulae you end up with an overall width of 79.19" so pretty much where I wanted to be

And another image just because I can.....

Hey Ho Sailor !

Well, that is how I am going to call this new quilt. The Westfalen fabric I used for this quilt (and posted about here) reminds me of clothes that is or was worn by sailors and fisherman. I in fact in North Germany is where you see a lot of it worn by fishermen.

So I keeping singing to myself 'Hey Ho drunken sailor...' all the time but really don't think I can call the quilt something with 'drunken' in it. Mind you, Denyse Schmidt does it with one her patterns.... I'll have a think about it.

Anyway here are the pictures of the finished top. When I started laying it out on my floor this week I wasn't convinced at first as I thought it was to dark somehow but over the last days everyday time I walked past it, it grew on me. So much so that I was amazed when I took the picture earlier at how beautiful it is. Sometimes one needs a bit of disctance to appreciate ones handywork and that is best achieved with a  photo.

Quilting will commence imminently !

One Cranberry Crush - done !

Last weekend I finished the Cranberry Crush quilt I started towards the end of last year. Am I happy with it ? You bet. Everything about it delights my eyes. If you have followed my previous posts about it's progress (here, here and here) you will know that I used Anna-Maria Horner's Innocent Crush Range for this quilt and for the solid colourshott from Oakshott fabrics.

Fabric: Innocent Crush from Anna-Maria Horner
Wadding: Quilter's Dream
Quilting: Machine quilt
Quilting thread: Gueterman Sulky 30 in cranberry (1169)
Size: 74 x 74 inches (just under 1.90 m square)

As you can see from the photos the front is a zickzack pattern and the back a 9-patch combination. So basically nothing more than half square triangles and squares. Though one does have to put in some effort to get the zickzack pattern on point. I find that the best method is to cut squares and to sew on both side of the diagonal before cutting the square into two triangles. This ensures minimal stretch of the biased cut fabric.

Cranberry Crush is the first quilt I entirely machine quilted and whilst I will write a thorough review about my first 2 months experience with the Janome Horzion next week, I'd like to say that it has been a blast. I would never have imagined that machine quilting is so easy and that much fun. I always thought it to be hugely difficult. But I really had no problems at all, flatness issues, nothing. I quilted along the zickzack lines about 1.2 inches apart across the entire quilt.

Front (or back ?)

This is also the first time I used colourshott from Oakshott fabrics. The solid is easy to use a little thinner than Kona cotton for example but it is much richer in colour and has a wonderful sheen to it. The entire colour pallet is sumptuous and I am planning to use it a lot more in the future.
The cranberry solid gives the quilt  a really deep and lush feel to it.

Back (or front ?)

Lovely crinkly after it has been washed

 

Binding

 I used the 'Bubble Burst in Rich' for binding as its dark colour adds richness to the mood of the quilt and frames it well.

Storage

Monty's Urban Circus

...quilt is done. Have a look !

It turned out wonderfully I couldn't be more pleased with the outcome.

Fabric used:  Urban Circus by Laurie Wisbrun and Kona Cotton.
Wadding: Quilter's Dream
Quilting: Combination of machine and hand quilting
Quilting thread: Gueterman Sulky 30 in grey and No 16 Perle in orange (833) and Petrol (902)
Size: 33 x 43 inches

This is the first finished quilt for which I used my new machine. I machine quilted around the sashing hand quilted within the blocks. The machine quilting is fantastic and I would have never thought I enjoy it so much and it really does save a lot of time. But more about that when I report back on the finished Cranberry Crush quilt that is almost done.

The back of the quilt is a combination of leftovers from cutting the front fabric and large stripes of the Kona in Caribbean and School bus. Both colours are wonderful and I can't get enough of the Caribbean green. The other colours are Chocolate, Baby Pink or Dusty Peach and Ash for the sashing.

I love the binding. I used the stripy fabric for it and it looks like little teeth holding onto the quilt.

All what's to be hoped for now is the my neighbours like it.

I already blogged about this quilt here

Urban Circus quilt

 Remember a  while ago I bought this stash of Urban Circus fabric from Laurie Wisburn. I adore the colours and freshness of the collection and aren't the elephants cute !

I had these earmarked for a quilt for my neighbours who just had their first child. I didn't know if it was going to be a boy or a girl so I chose something fairly gender neutral. Monty has finally arrived on boxing day (what a great name !) and it is time to make the quilt. I was set to make something with pinwheels as I hadn't tried these before.

So I made this block first:

But I quickly realised that this wasn't going to work as the lovely pattern of elephants and giraffes disappeared. I mean who wants to look at horribly mutilated giraffes !
So I went back to the drawing board. The best way to showcase this fabric would be squares but just squares are a bit boring and I have already two quilts that are done just with squares. Still set on the use of half square triangles I  looked through books and magazines and found in the 2nd edition of last years Fat Quarterly a design by Jennifer Davis that uses both ! Please have a look at her Circus Monkey quilt here. And Katy Jones from I am a ginger monkey also used a similar design, see here. The later I think appeared in the holiday edition of Fat Quarterly however I don't have this so can't really say much about it.

So the top looks like this and I am very very happy with it. I has a colourful yet contemporary look about it whilst showcasing the animal pattern well. I used the entire Urban Circus collection but added four different colourful solids to it as a frame. In addition I added sahing around the blocks. In the connecting sections I used little elephants I fussy cut out for them in order to stand out.

The solids are all from Kona. Isn't the Caribbean colour wonderful ?

The colours of the Kona solids are:

Caribbean
Chocolate
Schoolbus
Baby Pink or Dusty Peach (can't see the diffrence to be honest).
The sashing is done with Ash.


Hopefully Monty's quilt will be done by the weekend. Tomorrow there will be a further update on the Cranberry Crush quilt that is indeed coming on very nicely.