Wednesday 22 April 2015

Florette quilt

On the 14th I taught a lovely one day workshop at the shop, Jeni's Florette quilt pattern is a delightful quilt to make & I am totally smitten with it!  
Like the fool I am, I totally forgot to take any photos of the class so instead you get the treat of seeing the one I needed to make once I got home :) 
I knew I wanted a deeper tone to this quilt than a lot of my recent finishes, so I pulled out a whole lot of fabrics and started stacking.




I am quite happy mixing cotton lawn and quilting cotton with linen blends but your milage may vary. It felt like a safe thing to do for the flowers in this pattern as I am using quilting cotton for the sashing and hope it will stabilise the other substrates. 




The pattern its self is very beginner friendly giving options for both 12" and 15" blocks. For my own quilt I chose 15" blocks to show off the larger scale fabrics. On the topic of prints Him in doors has forever spoilt the top left print for me after pointing out it looks like Professor X finding mutants with Cerebo in the X-men movie *sigh* 





My original plan had been to make this quilt 3x4 blocks, to be a throw sized quilt, but once I'd reached that point I still had more fabrics shouting out to be used so figured what the heck and went bigger. 




I felt the need to back it with cotton lawn too for a really soft snuggly quilt. I went with Mystery food in Navy (one for the prints I've used on the front of the quilt) from  Sarah Watts Tokyo Train Ride collection and it feels Ah-mazing! 



With all of the soft textures and muted colours it really would've been rude not to add some perle cotton and hand quilting. 

 Hopefully after a few more seasons of Law and Order & The Originals   (highly recommended for Vampire and Werewolf teen drama) I'll have a finished quilt to show you! 


I thought I'd share some photos form my 5th beginners class at the shop (which I did remember to take photos of!) These classes have been going since November and are always great fun. We cover the basics of patchwork and quilting with the ladies getting to take home a project at the end of the class. This time we were making cushion covers from a 9 patch block with straight line machine quilting.




Perfect point matching first time! 



and a final photo of the students with their almost finished cushions, I believe hand stitching the binding down that evening with a glass of wine was on the cards for a few ladies! 



My next project is to sew up A Summer sampler quilt As we are hoping to offer this as a class over the summer holidays and someone needs to make a class sample :D 




Wednesday 8 April 2015

Easter Holidays, Etsy, Four Winds quilt and a sulky cat.

We're only 8 days in to April but thanks to some time off from my day job I've managed to get some sewing done. I've been posting on Instagram rather a lot over the holidays but thought I'd best get back to my blog and share some pics here too. 
So here are some photos of my month so far, I hope you enjoy the peek.


 Easter days at the beach, we've been heading out for a walk a day over the holidays & the beach is my favourite place to go.



Three customer quilts just needing binding Eeek! I had a large customer order come through at the end of Feb, they are due out the door by this weekend. I. Can. Not. Face. Binding. Them.



Four Winds quilt inspired by Jaimes cotton & steel version & too big to fit on my design wall! This has been my "get away" project, the one I have been planning in-between the Etsy order :) 


Due to all of the time out walking and sewing I think Issabella was wanting some extra attention so she climbed in my scrap basket, she isn't normally allowed in my sewing room so I think this may have been a touch of kitty revenge!