baby quilt

I made this little quilt for a little baby born quite prem a few months ago. She's now home and doing well. Quilt was made from a charm pack of 30's floral prints (Aunt Grace I think they're called?) and the rest was a white ikea sheet with a yellow and white stripe I had on hand from a baby quilt i made a year ago forming the binding. I used pellon instead of quilt batting for the first time to make it particularly light and soft, so it can be used as wrap as well as a quilt.

on the shelf

playing along with pip...



on my shelf: orange popular penguins - how i heart thee
and turtle toys from woolies... i love turtles. actually all of my shelves have turtles but these are my current faves.

new bag

last weeks project: new bag





i've completely lost interest in making my green quilt... hoping if i take a break i'll get my enthusiasm back...

exciting!

today I discovered that *finally* new fabrics are coming out from Denyse Schmidt.


Flea Market Fancy and Katie Jump Rope (her last two ranges) are my all time favourite fabric collections, but the new Hope Valley range are promising to be amazing!


meanwhile a poor quality photo of my current WIP - green tumbling blocks, for my bed. Current dilemma - what quilting design to use and do i experiment with hand quilting? free motion quilting? or stick with machining straight lines... would love to hand quilt but suspect it may never get finished if i go for that...




Unfortunately looks like a few more months til its available, but that just gives me more time to plan what I want to make - definitely loving this bluey greeny grey colourway. And thinking that given whats happened with flea market fancy (going out of print and becoming so hard to find) maybe i'll decide its a necessary investment to just buy a metre of each of them for the stash?



This is what I'm working on at the moment - green tumbling blocks for my bed. Big question is - if I start hand quilting it, will i ever finish it????

Sunday stash

Its not quite Sunday yet, but I did some stash building today at the Melbourne Quilt Fair...



Some more Denyse Schmidt, because I can't resist and I seem to have a growing obsession with yellow.



and some cute retro prints because, well, they were $3.50 a fat quarter and they were cute...?

Find of the day was a green fabric by the yard perfect for my green quilt I've been about to start for the last 4 months...



and at $8 a metre I was a happy chappy :)

Also bought some rulers, fabric pencil leads, extra fabric for another project thats underway and some fabric for a planned christmas present (organisation plus!)... in the space of a few short hours I managed to dispose of more money than I had planned, but came way with lots of goodies.

And when checking out the quilts on display, I was reminded of how much I love the tumbling blocks pattern. So after 4 moths of procrastinating starting my green quilt, I completely revised my planned pattern, and came home and have cut all the diamonds to make the fabrics into a tumbling blocks quilt! After making the quilts for my grandmothers I feel ok about the idea of machine piecing diamonds, which I used to think was just too hard. Tomorrow when I start the actual piecing I may live to regret my changed pattern, but here's hoping it will all come together with out too much stress.

I made this

Thought I'd play along with this one from Meet Me at Mikes... so... I made this last weekend:



owl embroidered in chain stitch on to white drill and backed in white minky.

I've just finished the embroidery for a grey elephant and a green turtle... i'm liking making these!

Quilts for grandmas

Both my grandmothers turn 90 next month, and I've made them both quilts for their birthdays. My photos are terrible I'm afraid, but hopefully will get better ones of them in their new homes soon.

This one for Grandma Nancy - a single bed quilt:



and this one (still not bound, getting around to that any minute now) for Grandma Rita - a lap quilt about 130cm squared




Hopefully they'll like them, and they'll coordinate with the rooms they're intended for...

Both patterns are from a Japanese book of star based quilt patterns (no name for you as i have zero Japanese translation skills, but here's what it looks like)

the blue beast

well i have finally finished this quilt, a gift for one of my closest friends, which has taken over my house on and off for about 9 months now. Its been a bit of a struggle, partly because its roughly king size and partly because I decided not long after I'd started piecing the front that i didnt like the pattern I'd chosen. Grrrr.

Anyway, although I'm still not overly loving the front, I'm happy with the back, and figure that can be the new front, if its intended recipient feels the same way. And I am really happy with the quilting pattern I chose.



And now I can start on all the other projects I've had on hold for a while now. Next major project is another green quilt for me, this time for my bed.

creamy yellow baby quilt

A few weeks before Christmas my friend Asha and I were sitting in a cafe on a Saturday afternoon discussing all the presents we hadn't yet organised for Christmas, when we remembered one of Asha's oldest friends was having her baby shower just a few days after Christmas as well. While discussing Asha's present plans, I mentioned it would be nice to make her a baby quilt. Suddenly inspired we decided we would race our way across town to Amitie and buy the fabric for such a quilt...
We made it to Amitie at 3.50, conscious of there 4 o'clock close. We'd planned in the car, a simple patchwork quilt, all in yellows, perhaps alternating white with yellow. We grabbed down the various fabrics we liked, collecting up about 9 different yellows with a spots, stripes and checks theme. We found a white with a very small yellow dot to be the alternating fabric, and I did some of the wildest calculations I'd done in a while (no graph paper scale drawings to assist) and we were out by closing time. For two usually indecisive people it was quite a feat.

We headed straight home, and I got Asha set up on cutting out while I chain pieced pairs of squares. Asha pressed them and we had them laid out on the floor by dinner time.

where they sat for the next two weeks.
With me leaping over them every time I went in the kitchen.

The plan had been for this to be a joint project, but with Asha's workload reaching its usual pre-Christmas out of control levels, it wasn't going to happen before the baby shower. Until I went into Christmas melt down mode, became completely obsessed with the idea that *everything* had to be done before Christmas, and decided to finish as a surprise for ash... the fact that she wanted to be part of making it was lost to my crazed mind, and i sewed obsessively until it was done.

I really liked the quilting, which I'd seen somewhere on flickr - a few rows in each direction offset to one corner of each square.

Apparently it went over well at the baby shower and its little owner is hopefully now making good use of it.