Farm animals wall hanging

I have been quite busy over the last couple of weeks making a present for our next door neighbours' new baby who was born last Thursday.  I decided that I would not make a quilt but something a bit different.  I applied my usual rule for presents of making as much as possible of it from fabric that was already in my stash.  I did very well because I also found I had wadding and backing fabric so no shopping required.  Here it is:

The design is by Margaret Rolfe from her book 'A Quilter's Ark'.  This book was published in 1997 and I made one or two things from it then.  I was surprised to see that it is still available but I can see why people might want to make the designs as they are rather fun.  The blocks are foundation pieced.

I found it quite fiddly as it was a long time since I had worked this way and the blocks are quite small.  They are finished with hand embroidery.

In the past I have enlarged the pattern to make larger blocks that can be used on their own. The book includes a wonderful Noah's Ark which would be great for a really special child but after doing this hanging, I realise it would also be quite a large piece of work as each animal appears twice.

Bookwrap Gems

Like lots of other people, I am making a rather belated attempt to produce bookwrap gems for the Festival of Quilts.  These will form the basis of the tombola and raise funds for the quilt museum in York.  Some of us see it as an opportunity to recycle UFOS, leftovers and even journal quilts.  Margaret Cooter is aiming to make thirty and has put instructions on her blog (see 'This weekends bookwraps') The 2010 journal quilts are just the right size for an A6 bookwrap and you can find a quick way of converting them into bookwraps here at A Fabric Adiction:  sjtreen.blogspot.co.uk   However, when I got mine out I found that some of the compositions do not work when turned 90 degrees. I also remembered that 2010 was the year I learnt to do extremely narrow (1/8 ins) bindings which meant that I had to remove the bindings completely and sew on new ones.

Actually I began making bookwrap gems in the winter.  I made two by hand from scraps of fabric that I then overlaid with net and heavily hand-stitched.  This one is fine.

I put a binding on the second one and then found it was not big enough to hold the book so it has gone into the cupboard and will have to be rethought.

Now I have started again.  I have made several A6 sized ones from fabric that I had variously dyed, painted, treated with Thermofax stencils etc. and I have gone through a folder of old embellishments and found one or to things that can be reused.  Here are some of this week's efforts.

This one was fabric I dyed years ago and then later thermofaxed with circles blanked out.

And this one is two very small leftover pieces of dyed fabric plus a contrasting 'spine'.

More dyed and thermofaxed fabric.  These are all A6 size because I have been trying to use up small leftovers but I am also determined to some A5 sized ones.  So far I have one finished

The triangles on this one were part of an experiment in making paper quilts.

Yesterday I began converting my 2010 journal quilts.  I am still struggling with fastenings for them so they will appear later.  You may be asking why I am making journal quilts in a glorious (to me) heatwave.  Well,, it is actually too hot to be outside for much of the day and I have discovered that my studio is the coolest room in the house.

Budapest

At the beginning of this month I went on a cruise down the Danube with my sister and her husband.  We were lucky to miss the floods - apparently at one point we were the only boat that the company (Viking River Cruises) still had moving.  There were something like seventeen boats 'stuck' at various points further upstream but we began in Budapest and went downstream to Bucharest so we ran ahead of the flood water.

We began with two days in Budapest.  It is a lovely city and would make a good place for a short city break.  Unfortunately it is also full of tourists and we did rather feel we were part of the mass tourist industry.

I cannot bear my photos being full of people's heads so I tended to concentrate on taking shots of details.  The Matthias church on top of the hill in Buda has been totally rebuilt following war damage and now contains some really good painted walls and wall paintings.

The pillars also had very interesting painted decoration:

I was quite proud of taking these photos with no flash, just by increasing the ISO, taking a deep breath and leaning against something if possible.

The outside of the church is highly decorated and has some interesting tile patterns on the roof.

We had a half day coach tour of the main tourist spots but we were free for the rest of the two days.  Unfortunately I am now finding steps and staircases a bit problematic so I was not able to go to some places that I fancied such as the Ethnographic Museum.  This is situated in an old house so there are lots of steps up to the entrance and I have to be very careful about falling down steps.  So I walked around the area where the hotel was situated and if you look hard, you can find all sorts of interesting architectural features.

These sails were the roof of a paved area in the park across the road.  They have distinctive gratings in the pavement which tell you what services are below.  This one is electricity

and this one is the postal service.

In the park opposite the hotel I found a 'sculpture' of padlocks.  I am not sure what it was but the padlocks have wonderful potential for design.

It has taken me ages to edit my photos so Day 2 of Budapest will be in the next posting.

May

This month our calendar picture is of a house on the island of Torcello in the Venetian lagoon.  Note the chimneys.  They are built like this in Venice so that the sparks from them do not immediately fall on the roofs and set the houses on fire.  This house stands on a canal that runs across the island and takes you to the famous Venetian-Byzantine cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta.  The best thing about this church are the mosaics but I am afraid I was not skilled enough to try photographing them.

I suddenly see that this blog has almost died.  a quick catch up is in order.  I spent a lot of April working on the quilt top for my bed and I am pleased to say that it is now almost finished.  The top is done

and I then spent some time finding suitable fabric for the border. Unfortunately it appears that people who stock pre-cut Bali fabrics do not also have the same ones by the metre but in the end I found a Hoffman fabric that tones well.

At that point the gardening took over and I have still not made the border.  I have a mattress which is ten inches deep.  It is extremely comfortable but it does mean the quilt is even larger than a normal king-size.  I have decided I shall have to piece it on the straight as otherwise there will be too much wastage.

I now reckon I have enough fabric for a second top if I add cream batiks to the leftover from this one and alos add a charm pack that I bought in order to check the colour for the border fabric.  Something to think of next winter perhaps although I am running out of people to make quilts for, don't like doing full-size ones and really want to get back to art quilting.

A new bed quilt

The terrible cold weather, even in Cornwall, has continued so no gardening and almost no walking.  It is good to look at this month's photo on the calendar and realise that some places are hot!

This is sunset at Changi beach, Singapore.  Changi beach is next to the airport and it is a very noisy place but popular with the locals who go there for picnics, taking their dogs, small tents to shelter from the hear and sun and even their cats on leads!  And most of them travel there by bus so I don't know how they carry everything.

Back in England I have got hooked into making a new quilt for my bed.  First I finished the quilt for the Alzheimers charity which enabled me to try out the block design I had chosen.

Not one of my best efforts I am afraid.  With hindsight I don't think glueing it was a good idea.  The quilting has puckered badly but then I realised that there might be something wrong with my walking foot.  This foot is twelve years old and has worked very hard.  I tend to think things will last for ever so I tried it out over various thicknesses of fabric and it was not 'walking' properly even when it was just two or three pieces of cotton rather than a proper sandwich.  This morning I was speaking to a professional longarm quilter and she said they could 'go'.  Fortunately it was not a disaster as my small Bernina came with a walking foot and I found that it fitted the old machine perfectly.  So this quilt is now finished and ready to be sent off.

As I said in my last posting I decided the best way to tackle a large kingsize quilt was to use precut fabric.  Here it is:

I bought the fabric from Kaleidescope www.kalquilts.com as I love their range of batiks.  It is quite difficult choosing this sort of thing from a website and the colours include rather a lot of purples for my taste.  Basically it is blackcurrant colours.

However there are also greens and turquoises and some of the pinks are lovely.  My husband HATES pink and for many years it was banned in this household!  I will have to buy some fabric for the border in due course so I shall probably try to find something in the blue/green range.  So far it appears that Hoffman makes up these packs from fabrics that don't then appear on suppliers' websites as yardage although the plain colours are generally there.

I have made 63 blocks and the sashing strips to go between them.  I am now stitching the sashing to the squares and am making good progress, having completed three and a half rows of nine squares.  I have to lay it out on the bed to see the whole thing as I do not have a design wall (a piece of foam) that is anywhere large enough for the whole thing so I probably won't have an idea of the whole thing for some time yet.  More pictures will follow soon.

This is not a cheap way of making a quilt.  Two sets of strips and two packs of ten inch squares cost over £100.  I have found a shop with a good range of extra wide quilt backs and sent off for samples for this quilt and another one that has been waiting for over a year to be sent to the longarm quilter.  I am going to send both quilts by Parcelforce as the quilter is at the other end of Cornwall and it is really too far to drive twice (two hours each way).  It will be strange to have new quilts on the beds but I am doing a major refurbishment of my bedroom and this quilt will probably last me out!

A new quilting tool: the iPad

I need to replace the quilt on my bed as the one I made in about 2001 is falling to pieces.  It is huge and when I finished the present one I swore I would never make another bed-sized quilt.  But if I don't I am not going to have one at all!

I have spent a lot of time wondering how to buy the fabric, given that there are almost no shops down here, I find it difficult to match colours on-line and I will not be going to FOQ this year (mainly because my husband if involved with a conference in London and someone has to be here to mind the cats).  So I have decided to use layer cakes and jelly rolls.  This meant I needed to choose a design.  I decided to buy one of Pam Lintott's books and settled on Layer Cake, Jelly Roll and Charm Quilts.  I bought the Kindle version, partly because it was cheaper and partly because it is not available in the bookshops down here. My Kindle is an app. on my iPad.  I have always thought that having Kindle versions of quilting books would not work but now I realise that you just take the iPad into the studio and keep it open at the page you are working on.  You can also take photos of works in progress and this was brilliant for arranging the blocks.  I still have to work out where to put the notes I would normally scribble in the book but I guess I should start using the Notes function on the iPad.

When I make a big quilt I like to do a trial block.  Last week I heard about a project to make quilts as a fundraiser for Alzheimers in Scotland You can find details at www.annhillquilter.co.uk. It occurred to me that I could make them a quilt to try out the design for my bed quilt.  I have opted for one called 'Old Gold'.  The quilts have to be forty inches square which meant nine blocks plus a three inch border.  I tend not to get involved in projects with deadlines these days and these have to be submitted by May.  The aim is to cover the football pitch at Hampden Park in Glagow with 5000 quilts.

I did not want to have to buy anything for this project.  The top is made from fabrics in my stash and I have chosen to work in bright colours as a change from all those landscapes.

I knew I had some big pieces of wadding and I have managed to find a piece for the backing that I bought for something else but have not used.  Over the weekend I put the top together.

Yesterday I put a dark blue batik border on it and this afternoon I have put the 'sandwich' together.  I decided to risk glueing it rather than having more problems with machine quilting and pins.  I think some free random quilting will be needed in the blocks and I am very out of practice at that!  First, I plan to quilt a straight line grid on the sashing using random threads in primary colours.  Watch this space.

Whatever happened to March?

At the beginning of the year I decided that each month I would post the photo I had chosen for our calendar for that month.  So here we are in mid-March and I realise I completely forgot to do it.  So here it is:

This is a villa on the shores of Lake Como at a place called Corenno Plinio.  We had a picnic lunch there on the holiday I took in September 2011.

I have been busy this month and have done quite a bit of my lap quilt.  I am machine quilting it but it is so long since I have done anything this size that my skills are deteriorating.  There are numerous places where the machine has jumped stitches.  I cannot be bothered to undo them all.  I think the problem is the machine going over pins even though I take them out as I sew.  I did once have a problem with the needle jumping that required professional help but I do not think that is the case this time.

I have brought the quilt into the house so that I can end off the threads in comfort.  Big mistake.  Pania is addicted to wadding and when I have left it lying around a couple of times I have returned to find she has chewed the wadding on the edge.  Now it is living in a pillow case.  Here is a photo of Pania and Hinemoa on the quilt.  They just think quilts are for them.