Flower Sugar and Friends - a finished quilt

And a finished quilt that I absolutely adore. This baby quilt was pieced together fast and it was fun to play with those wonderful fabrics.

This is the first time I used  Heath from Alexander Henry as background fabric and I am totally taken by the effect. The subtle grey makes the colours in the stripes pop out so effectively. 

The quilting was an easy decision and I combined outlining the seams with a cross hatch pattern on a stitch length of 4 (I usually use 3.5 but have recently decided that the longer length looks better). What stitch length do you normally use for your straight line quilting ?

The quilt measures about 40 1/2" x 34 1/2" (103 cm x 88 cm).

The back features a very effective graphical print from Timeless Treasures from the I Heart collection by Rashinda Coleman-Hale.

And the binding is 'Oval Elements' in Peacock by Art Gallery. The colours are so fresh and bright and just make me smile every time I see it.

Let's hope this is inspiration for students who may want to join me in the baby quilt class in September at the Village Haberdashery.

Flower, Sugar and Friends

I am holding another Baby Quilt class at the Village Haberdashery in September and have been planning to make a new class sample for a while now. So the other day I came across the few fat quarters of Lecien Flower Sugar I have in my stash and thought something ought to be done with it. They are the really beautiful prints from an older collection of the series (about 2 years ago) but the the new collection is rather gorgeous too by the way just in case you want to add it to your stash.

I love the turquoise, bright green and red in those prints and dived into my stash and scraps and pulled out a few more complimentary bits. I felt like doing something different and started cutting strips that I then combined with my Alexander Henry Heath in Steel Gray and the result are some beautiful 6" squares that are a mixture of strip pieced and half square triangle. I saw these first at Fresh Lemons Quilts sometime last year and the picture hast stuck ever since somewhere on the back of my brain. Faith also has a tutorial for those little butterflies too.

Oh deer - a finished quilt

And another finished quilt. May I share with you my latest strip quilt that I finished in a whirl wind last Saturday before taking of for a couple of days to Santorini. Thanks to the wonders of scheduling I should still be in what looks like a very rainy Greece when you read this (umpf...). Well I haven't been away since February this year and I am determined to enjoy myself for a few days no matter what the weather is going to be.

'Oh deer' is the new line from Momo for Moda and I love its colours, so saturated and warm. They are just the right shades and depth for Autumn.

I quilted in double diagonal lines in the same way as 'When Lucy met Daisy'.
This gives the quilt another dimension in addition to the horizontal strips.

What I love so much with the collection is that we have small and large prints in addition to stripes that really come into their own as a jelly role strip. But my favourite print has got to be the little deer print. The figures are tiny and even on the small 2 1/2 width strip you get a lot of repetitions. 

I stayed with the woodland theme for the quilt back and dug out a rather precious print of which I bought several yards 2 years ago. This is spotted owl in smoke by Alexander Henry. I know the quilt cotton designers have meanwhile moved on from owls and foxes to crabs but I still think this is one of the best animal prints that has ever been made.

For the binding I chose a stripy number in white and red to offset both, the quilt front and back.

Guilty pleasure

Guilty Pleasures. I think we all have them. I have many; food related mine are ice cream or pizza and entertainment related it is Fringe or Haven in TV. Love it, and I feel most happy on my sofa under a thick quilt when I can watch an episode of Fringe and if I allow myself an ice cream while watching .....then... well.. it is heaven.....

But the other day I also realised I have a guilty pleasure when it comes to quilting. And that are jelly roles ! Yes you heard right, jelly roles. I used to hate them and still do when I unroll the thing and it makes a blooming mess everywhere. But they do satisfy a need for simple quilting in me and in particular when I just finished a big and complex project.

I love strip quilts as you probably know by now and a jelly role fulfills just that love in a quick and sort of dirty way. You just unroll, place the strips in a pleasing manner and start sewing... 2 hours later you have a quilt top !

Tell me do you have quilting related guilty pleasures ?

This here is a strip quilt from the new Momo for Moda collection 'Oh Deer' that I purchased some weeks ago. This quilt top has been finished a few weeks ago but because I was working on this super secret project for the past 10 days I didn't have time to share it with you. That is also the reason why I did not blog much either. I thought I'd rather not bore you with randomness and come back if I have to show something.

The secret project will be revealed towards the end of next week but I can 't help put hint that it involves a rather prestigious well known British Fabric House.

I can't wait to spend some quality time with this quilt top tomorrow and am still quivering with excitement about the secret project!

Have a lovely weekend everybody.

Foks and Friends - a finished quilt

It took considerably less effort to finish this quilt than what the Olympic athletes had to come up with over the past two weeks. All it took was some time that I managed to find over the past weekend.

I don't want to uh and ah again about voile as I am sure it will bore you to tears by now but it really was such a pleasure again to work with this fabric despite the banana curve issue earlier when combining it with tana lawn. The softness is just out of this world. Jude and a few others suggested to actually start piecing strips from the middle which is not something I thought about and will definitely try when I make another effort combining these materials.

For now 'Folks and Friends' is finished and is every bit as gorgeous as I hoped it would be.

I quilted mostly in straight lines but added a Serpentine stitch here and there. Unfortunately the Janome Horizon doesn't have a nice programmed Serpentine stitch but I programmed one myself with the help of a splendidly written guide that can be found here (will also write a separate post about this in the next days).

The back is a vintage flower print from Liberty's of London that I bought as a remnant  piece at Shaukat last year.

For the binding I used Anna-Maria Horner's pastry print in toast (also voile) and was delighted to see that the colour matched perfectly with the back fabric.

The quilt measures 51" x 65" and is the perfect sofa-cuddle-size. It was quilted with Gueterman Sulky in silver/grey (no 1328) which blends wonderfully with this colour mix.

Folks and Friends can be purchase in my on-line ship here.

Folks and friends and banana curves

Voile. I. Love. you.

Really there isn't much more to say to this. I made my deep blue sea quilt last year from my ever growing stash of voile and and loved it to bits. And every time I open my voile/tana lawn box and feel the fabric I simply don't want to sew with anything else anymore. The softness of the voile is out of this world and tops most silks in my humble opinion. But of course that isn't realistic so I just allow myself every now and then a trip into voile land which is a bit like a guilty pleasure.

So I dived head first into the joyous land of voile and stitched together another strip quilt (sorry if you are getting bored of them). This time I wanted to mix it up by including some Liberty tana tawn print and solid but that went disastrously wrong.

When sewing a strip quilt top you need to hold on to the strips while sewing quite tightly, meaning when you are sewing together two strips you should hold the strips between your fingers to ensure they are fed evenly thought the machine while at the same time pulling slightly to the left so you are not creating a banana shaped curve. I am normally fairly aware of this having done two strip quilt before but with this one nothing worked. I had the worst banana shaped top you can imagine and my seam ripper had a whale of a time......

I wasn't quite sure what happened so started all over again but this time checked every couple of strips and found I only had the problem when I paired voile with tana lawn and no matter how well I held on to the strips while sewing the end result was still a curve rather than a straight line.

So in the end I binned all the tana lawn strips and stuck to just voile which worked a treat.

The prints used in this quilt top are a mixture of 'Little Folks', 'Innocent Crush', 'Loulouthi' and 'Prince Charming' which is why I am calling it 'Folks and Friends'

With all the Olympic watching going on there is little time to sew over the weekend but hopefully a few hours quilting will fit in somewhere. I fear my eyes are taking on a TV sized square shape soon.

What a great day team GB had yesterday and finally my home country Germany is picking up some medals too.