Sunday, March 29, 2009

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.

Thursday, March 5, 2009

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.