A finished postage stamp quilt

It seems hard to believe, but here it is: I actually managed to finish a second quilt this summer! I started making the quilttop during the Easter holidays and finished it right after the summer holidays. That's probably a speed record for me.

This really is the simplest design possible. The squares are 1.5" finished. It's the first time I tried a smaller square and it does make a difference. It looks more like postage stamps :-)

The binding is a black Kei Honeycomb fabric and the backing a extra wide version of  Newsprint by Carrie Bloomston. It is the very first time I've tried an extra wide fabric and this print and I must say I was a bit dissapointed by its quality. The weave is quite loose. Is that typical of those extra wide backing fabrics perhaps?

The quilt was handquilted with white DMC thread in the simplest quilt pattern possible. But the overal effect is quite pleasing.

The size of the quilt is 140cm x 200 cm, just big enough for a single bed or a very generous lap quilt. I wanted to make it a bit bigger but lacked the energy to start cutting and sewing again.

Now up to the next one! I'm actually making a sketch for a quilt, inspired by our recent trip to Sweden and all the beautiful flowers and Scandinavian design we saw there. And I might have bought some fabric there that would be perfect for a Scandinavian summer quilt...

A finished EPP quilt

Exactly 13 months ago, I decided to "do something" with a jelly roll I bought many years ago (snippets from American Jane). I wrote about it in this post.

After handpiecing the quilt, it was handquilted with perle cotton and finally a border was added, also by hand. I think I can rightly say this is a 100% hand-made quilt!

The quilt measures 152cm x 210 cm, so it is quite a generous size.

I added a border in a blue fabric. You might be able to see that it is actually piping.

For the back I chose a yellow flower fabric to stay in the sunny theme.

 The quilting shows really nicely on this fabric.

I'm calling this quilt "Grandmother's summer garden" because of the sunny colours. Although this summer, my garden looks more or less brown instead of the usual bright green...

This is my first finish of 2018, but I hope my new Juki sewing machine, that I will try for the first time today, will make it possible to add one or maybe two quilts to this list!

A blue postage stamp quilt

It has been a while that I have wanted to make a postage stamp quilt with blue fabrics. And so I selected 80+ blue fabrics (some not much bigger than scraps) to cut into 2 inch wide strips.

After cutting all the fabrics, and sewing them together, and cutting them in strips, and sewing the strips together again to make the blocks, I discovered I had not enough blocks to make a big quilt. And so I started the whole process once again: take the fabric, iron, cut, fold, put away. 80 times, two Sundays. And I had yet to start piecing.

The squares are 1.5 inch finished, the fabrics are both old and new, many Denyse Schmidt and many different others too.

 A postage quilt looks simple, and it is, but there is so much to cut and piece and cut again and piece again, there seems to be no end to it! Luckily for me, this weekend is a long one with a national holiday, so I had four whole days off from work! Those were well used to finaly piece the whole quilt.

The quilt measures 140x200cm, which means is is big enough to use on a single bed. Or as a very generous lap quilt. We'll see. Now I have to find a backing fabric (something grey I think) and start quilting.

An English paper piecing project

My sewing room is overflowing with fabric, so last summer I decided to use a jelly roll I bought years ago (Snippets from American Jane) for my first EPP project ever.

I worked all summer on this project, my first ever hand-sewn quilt top, and found it quite relaxing to do.

Once it was finished, I added a striped border in yellow and white.

The EPP-part was handsewn on the border.

And this is how the whole quilt looks:

This afternoon, the quilt was basted and is now ready for (hand)quilting, which will probably take all winter. I'm already looking forward to it!

A finished HST quilt with borders

I realized I have not yet written about finishing my HST quilt. After two years of (machine)sewing and then handquilting, I reached the final stitch some time ago, and here are some pictures.

As I have written before, this quilt was made from a pattern published in Quilts Japan. Unfortunately, as I do not read Japanese, I can not tell you the name of the author of the pattern. 

 It was the first time I added borders to a quilt and I am so pleased with the result that I will definitely do this again. Quilting the border was a long labour of love though, and I'm not sure how often I'll be able to repeat this proces on other quilts.

I'm now working on my very first hand sewn hexagon quilt, another long term project. For some reason, those always seem to attract my attention.

A travel sewing kit

A month ago, it was my daughter's birthday. And as she started a new job half a year ago, I thought it would be a good idea for her to have a compact sewing kit at her disposal in her desk. In case of wardrobe malfunctions, you never know. And so I started to think about what to buy for the sewing kit.

- scissors, of course;

- thread, of course, and in different colours, just in case;

- needles;

- a needle threader;

- buttons, also just in case;

- elastic, again just in case;

- a thimble;

- pins and safety pins;

- some other stuff.

The layout is pretty straightforward. I just put all the stuff I bought on a piece of fabric to decide on the size of the sewing kit. I knew I would make a folded model with an inserted zip, but that was all I had decided on before beginning.

Pretty quick, I decided to use leftover pieces of batting and quilt the fabric. 

 

After that, it was time to make the compartments for the different stuff. I chose a Denyse Schmidt flowery fabric for this. And a geometric Denyse Schmidt fabric for the zipper part and the scissors. My daughter likes flowers, but I did not wat to overdo it.

Once that part finished, I added a second piece of fabric for the back (will be the front when closed) and stichted through it on two places only: where the left and right part of the sewing kit will fold over. The binding was added to finish it of, the same way you would bind a quilt. 

Finally, a piece of fabric/string was added to be able to close the sewing kit. Tadaa! Finished!

And now, should I hope she'll use it a lot or not at all?

A finished curtain (ahem) quilt

In my previous post, I talked about how my colleague, who became a grandmother, asked me to make a quilt from some leftover curtain fabric for her granddaughters baby room. After making the quilttop, I was at first determined not to spend too much time on this quilt. After all, there is a small baby waiting for it and I don't really have the time to hand-quilt it.  Wouldn't it be easier to just machine-quilt straight lines through it? Stitch-stitch-stitch and stitch-stitch-stitch. Done. You see? I can actually finish a quilt in just two weeks!

Then I had another look at it. And I thought: naaaaah, not good enough. It needs something more. It needs hand quilting, no, it was actually screaming for some hand quilting. And so I obliged the screaming quilt.

I quilted around all the animals, the trees, the triangles and the leaves. And I liked it. But it took me three months extra, and baby is not a baby anymore but almost a toddler... Let's hope they haven't already changed the curtains in her room...

For the back, I chose a new Ikea print, very colourful and bold but the same style as the curtain fabric. It was a bit thicker though and that made it harder to hand quilt. The binding is made from a Denyse Schmidt fabric and also hand sewn.

Tomorrow, I'll take it to work and give it to my colleague. Let's hope she'll like it...

From curtain to baby quilt - Van gordijn naar baby quilt

A colleague of mine became a grandmother and asked me to transform some the leftover curtain fabric for the new baby room into a baby quilt. The fabrics are blue, gold and orange and have a modern design.

The two fabrics ont the top are the fabric curtain, the other fabrics are the ones I pulled to complement them.

As we have had some excellent weather lately, I brought my sewing machine down from the attic (where it was far too hot to work on a quilt) and worked in the garden. What a joy that was!

I chose strong, modern designs to go with the curtain leftovers, because the last thing I wanted was a quilt that looked as if there was an extra curtain lying on the bed or the floor, and simply added stripes of fabric.

This was a first selection of fabrics and layout.
 

And this is the final selection. I ended with using the border fabric to do just that: make a border around the quilt. This tied all the fabrics really nicely together. The size is abourt 120x160cm.

The wide stripes of fabric are the leftover curtain bits, as are the borders. The other fabrics are from Katie jump rope by Denyse Schmidt and from Echo, Lotta Jansdotters first collection. I like both of these collections so much that I always hesitate to use them, but they looked so great with the curtain fabric that I didn't think twice about it.

All I have to do now is wait for the temperatures to go down, so that I can baste the quilt without fainting.