better late than never

The Naked Bed Challenge quilt top is done! It was supposed to be finished by June 2nd, but a series of unexpected events, plus a trip to the beach with my boys on my one big free day, meant I had to keep putting it off.

Oh well. Here it is and it is exactly what I had in mind: sweet and soothing. Only it is really, really big.

I guess that's what a queen size quilt is, but WOW. It is tempting to tie it because I don't know how I am going to quilt the thing on my dinky Singer. But I would like to do straight lines all the way across in white and gray and blue, so I guess I'll give it a try. Maybe.

Now I'm off to prepare the backing for it...

creative quilt top

I lost my sewing room this weekend to our new au pair. Although I am so glad to have reinforcement on the way, it was a little sad to put my fabric and notions away in boxes. Not having space to leave my machine and the iron out will mean a lot less sewing. I was able to get a lot done in twenty-minute increments of stolen time, here and there.

Luckily, I managed to finish this one last thing before packing it all up.

It is the top to what will hopefully soon be a quilted wall hanging. I followed this tutorial and it was the most fun I've had piecing since I made the improvisational blocks for my sons' quilt.

I didn't follow the guidance exactly. She recommends using four fabrics; I used three. She doesn't break up the strips as much as I did either. But I started out the way she suggested and relied heavily on her tips and the examples she provided for inspiration.

This concept of a non-pattern is incredibly appealing to me. It was the first time I felt like I was making art.

serendipity

This is an old picture. The top is actually done, but I haven't taken any pictures, although it is all laid out on top of a leftover bit of batting I had on hand, which miraculously turned out to be a perfect fit without any planning.

I started this on a whim, using scraps. The pink was left over from my last quilt and the little coins of color are bits from another work in progress that I am gradually losing interest in. I saw this coin quilt and decided I needed to make one too.

It was the fastest quilt top to put together. I usually only have twenty to thirty minutes about once or twice from Mon-Fri to spend in my sewing room, and on weekends I can maybe get a few hours in if the conditions are right, but this came together in almost no time at all. And when I pressed the seams and flipped it over it just kept looking sweeter and sweeter.

But then I but couldn't decide how to do the back. I had a bunch of ideas but they were all awful and I kept changing my mind. I even cut and started sewing a couple before coming to my senses.

Then today, as I sat working right around lunchtime, the mailman rang the bell and told me I had customs duties to pay. Two packages of fabric from the States! Inside were a bunch of yards I'd nearly forgotten I'd ordered and lo and behold, there was a yard of a perfect pale yellow (Kona maize) that looked so sweet. I lay it on top and immediately saw that it was a perfect fit, color, size and all. No piecing! I had also, though I don't know why, ordered a yard of pretty green cotton with tiny aqua dots. That will probably end up getting cut up into strips for binding.

So unless I can think of a better name, this will be a Serendipity quilt. It's going to a friend who is elatedly expecting her third child and has been put on bed rest. The baby's fine, but she is bored to tears. Bet you can't guess, based solely on my quilt, if it's a boy or a girl.

wip

This was the first quilt I started planning. Only the fabric didn't get here right away, and then when it did, I changed my mind about everything and ordered more of some fabrics while putting away others, and so it got put on hold. Then I started started cutting and sewing, and changed my mind again.

The scraps though are fun to fool around with. A friend of mine is having a baby girl in July and I ordered some City Weekend to make a little baby quilt or changing pad, or maybe both, but it is taking forever to get here. So in the meantime I might end up throwing a little scrap coin quilt together for her.

basted

I put a red and aqua frame on it and that has helped tame the busyness immeasurably. I like it much better now and never get tired of looking at all the little scenes. There are dogs and snails and little boys and girls in the squares, and tiny little hedgehogs. The fabric is so charming and there is always something new to notice.

The colors, though, are a lot for me, and I don't think I will take on so much red! and pink! and aqua! and gray in one single project again. It is too much for me. Not my style, I guess.

I don't know if you can see it in the picture above, but this quilt is called "Take me to the park" which I've embroidered in red on one little white square.

I can't wait to see this all finished. The back is even sweeter.

something beautiful

Finishing the quilt for the boys gave me more confidence in my abilities. As I worked on it, there was always, at the back of my mind, a tugging doubt that I might not finish. That I might come to some part of it that proved too difficult and I would abandon it altogether.

But that didn't happen. And as soon as it was done - or even before then - I was already thinking of what I could make next.

I managed to get my hands on some early release Sherbet Pips and I have been putting together a charm square quilt. It is smaller and there is some embroidery.

Much to my astonishment, I enjoy embroidery. (A lot!)

But I'm not so sure about the quilt. I love pieces of it, but when I look at it as a whole, there is just so much going on.

I could give up and put it away, or I could draw on the confidence gained with the Cars and Rockets and persevere, which I think is what I'll do. I will just play around with it a little until I come up with something I can live with.

Although I am enjoying it, it's a little discouraging because part of what I love so much about my newly discovered hobby is the way something beautiful comes out of it. There is this long, slow process, first the idea begins to take shape, then it grows and grows, taking on a life of its own, until it wants out of my head, and then I begin to make it. And little unexpected things come out of it, like this:

And hopefully, when it is finished, it has turned into something beautiful.

(But I guess not everything can turn out as well as one had hoped.)

In the meantime, my husband mentioned he needed a cover for his iPad and I was delighted. I put down my book immediately and ran for some fabric I thought he might like.

I suppose something useful will have to do for now.

sneak peak

Sunday dawned overcast - I know because my two-year-old called to me at exactly six a.m. to come get him out of bed and we watched the pink sunrise together over breakfast - and after everyone was up, I thought I might try to finish the back of the boys' quilt.

It was finished by lunchtime, so I figured I might as well tempt fate and try to baste it while my two-year-old took his nap.

Not only did I baste the thing, but he slept for three hours and I quilted it too. The whole thing. He woke up before I was done, so the very end of it was quilted with him climbing on me, but it turned out okay regardless, and was in keeping with how I'd pieced it. With him in my lap or climbing on my back...

The free motion quilting was still too intimidating and I don't have the right foot attachment for it anyway, so I did vertical wide-angle zigzags instead. After the first line I felt a little giddy with how good it looked.

Now all it needs is the binding... but I might not have the time for that until next Sunday.

quilt top done

Each block is different and they are all improvised. I just played around with bits of fabric until I came up with an arrangement I liked, sewing up one or two a day and all the while hoping it would look good when I put everything together.

This morning I arranged the blocks and began assembly. When it was done I realized I'd unwittingly created something of a pattern with the placement of the blocks. The ones with orange form one diagonal line, while the blocks with blue are around the edges.

I am pleased with how it looks. And my corners match up! Success.

It seemed to go by so quickly, the piecing of this little quilt, and I look forward to finding the time to make the back before my batting arrives from England.

cars and rockets

This is what I am working on, the quilt for my son. I do a little each day. It is slow going, but, and I base this solely on the quality of my piecework thus far, I can't quit my day job just yet.

I will be using the car blocks for the top and then I will do the back in solid orange with a handful of rocket blocks, including that little guy.

Hey there, little guy.

couldn't resist!

These are so much fun to do. I said I'd allow myself one per day, because that's all I really have time for. Except, then, yesterday, I made an exception and did two.

The little bicycle and moped are my favorites. This will be a small quilt for my son, and it shouldn't take me long at this rate. I'll probably end up having to wait on the batting, which I have to order from the UK since I haven't been able to find any 100% cotton batting around here.

one step forward, two steps back

Well. I spent the better part of Epiphany wrangling quilting my nine square quilt. I bought some pretty pale yellow thread and used straight horizontal and vertical lines.

It started out fairly well, except for the length of my stitches, which varied no matter how hard I tried to keep them even. And then, suddenly, things began to go awry. My fabric bunched up in a couple of places and I realized the quilt wasn't looking the way I had wanted it. But I would not give up! I would persevere! I finished quilting the thing.

Finally it was done. I took it off the machine and laid it out. I realized something had gone terribly wrong. There was the bunching, but it was more than that. The lines were too simple on an already simple quilt top, and the soft natural cotton fabric I decided to use for the sashing and back needed something sweeter and looser. The straight lines were almost too harsh for it. They made it look not just shoddy, but really drab, too. It was all wrong.

An hour later, I was ripping it all out.

Three days later, and I still have a third of the quilting seams to rip out. I have quilted around and inside the blocks in orange, green, yellow and blue perle cotton as I go, so that I don't go crazy with my seam ripper and poke my own eyes out; the hand quilting keeps me sane.

We had terrible wet weather this weekend. My husband built me a fire in the fireplace and I spent a few hours a day on the couch with my nine square quilt. It is so nice and cozy, even if it is still unfinished, and on Saturday, my five-year-old climbed in under it with me. He wasn't tired! He just wanted to help by ripping out a couple of stitches, and then he rested his head on my shoulder and promptly fell asleep.

If I'd been feeling at all discouraged, this would have cured me of it.

my first completed quilt

I am so proud. It is the tiniest little thing. A doll quilt, basically. But it is mine! And it is completed. And I kind of love it.

This is my favorite block:

This is the back, a single wonky star:

I followed the wonky star tutorial I found on The Silly Boodilly, which Film in the Fridge also links to, and it was very simple and fun. My husband liked it a lot and asked for a quilt made up completely of stars, but my five-year-old did not care for the wonky stars at all and went so far as to instruct me to make everything even on his quilt - which is still in the design stage - and not crooked, like on this one.

It was very much a learning process, and making a bunch of completely different blocks taught me a little more about construction than I would have learned from my simple square quilt.

There are tons of glaring mistakes:

In my eagerness, I neglected to cut all those little threads and now when I hold the quilt up to the light, I can see little blue threads through the white fabric. Not pretty.

Also, I thought it would be easier to square everything as I stitched (??) or after the fact, only to realize that maybe such approximate cutting wasn't such a good idea.

I definitely need to work on my quilt sandwich basting skills as well. When it came time to quilt some areas, I had little pouches of fabric with nowhere to go. Whoops!

Lastly, my sewing machine isn't the greatest and I often have to rethread. There is a little area in the piecework where the seam is already loose. And I haven't even washed it yet...

But I enjoyed the process so much that I went out for some sashing fabric for my abandoned nine square quilt - I couldn't wait for my fabric to arrive from the US!

It is very exciting the way everything comes together, one bit at a time, from putting the pieces together, assembling the layers and then quilting. I had a lot of fun trying out different quilting lines and patterns and I loved stitching on the binding at the end.

I think I might be hooked.

improvisational quilting

This could very well become my first completed quilt. All four blocks of it. (Not counting the wonky star block on the back.)

I was about to cut some orange, red and pink striped fabric for the binding when my son freaked on me. "It doesn't go!" And so it will be a boring blue binding for this teeny tiny mini-quilt. But at least it's doable, which is more than I can say for the other, near forgotten one.

quilts!

Now that I have caught the quilting bug I can't stop thinking about design and fabric and piecing techniques.

Sadly, I put away the quilt I started because I'd been looking at it so long I couldn't stand it anymore and the white fabric I bought for the sashing is wrong, all wrong. I couldn't decide between white and off-white or even whether maybe it would be fun to use a color or a pattern, but I ended up just going with white because it seemed like the simplest solution and I would definitely be able to make use of the scraps.

It looked awful. Really, really awful, even after just sewing two strips between the three blocks in the bottom row. At least the white will come in handy elsewhere.

G says to use an off-white, but I feel like that would be so dreary and also make the quilt look dirty. I am thinking a pale green, like Kona celery (and again, I don't know because I've only seen it on the computer screen), but that would mean buying more fabric and I am not buying anymore fabric at least until the fabric I've already bought arrives. If I don't draw a line - no exceptions! - my purchases will spiral out of control.

So, the blocks have been folded away until I reach a decision and buy more fabric. I have a feeling though that when my new fabric does make its way to Italy, other projects will take priority, like the little Birch Organic car quilt I promised my son and the Art Gallery quilt I have been busy designing.

I think I am a little obsessed.

progress

Wouldn't you know it. About two hours after I complained about having to wait so long for that fabric to arrive, it did. And it is so lovely.

It is very different from the Italian fabric I am using now. The colors are brighter, the patterns more modern, and as tempting as it is to put away the blocks I've done and start something new and fresh, I am still prodding along with the Blimunda quilt.

The blocks have already been ironed and I have been playing around with them. I had them arranged like this temporarily when my husband came in to see what I was up to. He ended up switching everything around and it looks so much nicer now that I think I will keep his arrangement.

At this point the quilt is much bigger than I initially thought it would be. It is going to end up big enough for a single bed or to fit all of our small family snug on the couch. I bought some white for the border and backing, along with batting. I am going to do thin strips of white around the blocks and a white backing with one 12-cm strip (or two?) all the way across the back made up of my scraps from the blocks.

I am thinking I will quilt it in a grid through the blocks. I like the way the squares will look when the quilting lines run on each side of the ditch, about one or two centimeters away from it, almost highlighting the points where the different fabrics meet. And then once I've done that, I might do some handquilting around each block in yellow, orange or green Perle cotton thread because I think that would look pretty and sort of be in keeping with the shabby chic look I am going for at this point. Actually, I am really looking forward to the handquilting part.

Not that I haven't enjoyed this whole process because it is so relaxing, but also exciting at the same time. I love the way the fabrics look next to each other once they are sewn and pressed.

And then I think I might pick up some more of that orange fabric for the binding. My husband says to use the pale green stripes, but I wouldn't mind using that bright orange. It's not gingham, but almost, and has a faint green line running through it which I just love. I could handstitch the binding on with green thread and it would be a very sweet way to close up my sandwich.

But that is not going to happen anytime soon. I have yet to finish the stockings and my son's teacher has asked me to sew the gnome hats for the Christmas play, which of course takes priority over everything right now...

misgivings

As I slowly (but surely!) piece together the top of my first quilt, I am beginning to think about a border, backing and binding. I have been to a couple local fabric stores to browse, but I haven't seen anything very promising and the prices are so expensive. The cheapest cotton quilting fabrics are at least €18/metre! The ones I favor are more than that, and I don't even care for those all that much.

And then on top of that I am having mixed feelings about my quilt. It's the color scheme, mainly, which is all over the place. (What was I thinking?) I am beginning to toy with the idea of adding a small off-white or tangerine border all around the squares. Or else just around the outside. Maybe that would tie it all together? Or, quite possibly, make it worse. And it would just add to the amount fabric I need ...

In the meantime, I am still waiting for my beautiful fabric to arrive from the US. I ordered it in November and it was supposedly shipped on the 20th. The cost is a small fraction of what I would have paid for anything remotely similar here, but the wait is long.

my first mistakes

I have cut all my squares for the blocks and I really like it! So I might not be in love with the color scheme and I can see where I could have chosen fabrics I like a little bit more, or just bought more of my favorites and left out the ones I don't care for so much, but I think it will work out anyway.

Also, I calculated wrong and made my squares too big! They will end up 12 cm instead of 10. The blocks are much bigger than I had planned for!

Oh well, it will be nice to have a larger quilt anyway.

the blimunda quilt

I've been stalking the Blimunda blog in preparation for my first quilt. If Barbara checks her stats at all she'll be glad for the two countries that divide us.

Following her tutorial, I am planning an easy peasy square block quilt. She has chosen eight seven dot and circle fabrics. And now that I've found my fabric as well, it is getting easier to imagine I'll actually be able to do this.

I had about an hour to spare yesterday evening and so I went to a fabric shop that opened in October. The selection wasn't as big as I had hoped (even the owner mentioned her glee when she entered a fabric store in the US for the first time a few years ago) but I found the four fabrics on top of the pile pictured fairly easily. I also really like the bursts of color in the bottom fabric, but I have mixed feelings about the polka dots on the yellow and green. I bought enough fabric that if I don't end up using those two, I should still have enough.

The shop owner gave me a 20% discount, and still it felt like the fabric was so expensive compared to American prices. If I find it is relatively simple to get the fabric I ordered on Etsy, I think I will just have to learn some patience and go that route from now on.

Barbara does her measurements in inches, but all of my supplies are based on the metric system and let's face it, it is much easier to calculate centimeters than it is inches, so I am sticking to what I know. I will cut nine 14-cm squares for each of my blocks. That should give me 10-cm squares once they are assembled for 30-cm blocks at the end, considering a 1-cm seam, which sounds fairly close to what Barbara has calculated.

I laid everything out on the couch in my office, which is probably where I will end up displaying the quilt unless I give it away, and when I got up this morning, I came in to have a peak and see if I still like the fabrics I chose. And I do! All except that green, which I'm still not so sure about.

So I hid it under the yellow.


My husband has taken the boys to school and it's snowing now, which is a nice excuse to skip my run and stay inside with all my plans for the Blimunda quilt.

decisions, decisions: fabric

And now, onto more serious pursuits: I found a quilt I'd like to make in this book.

But I'm finding it difficult to get my hands on fabric I like here that is priced reasonably. There are lots of very beautiful cottons and linens but they are pretty expensive. Most craft stores stock what they call "American cotton" for quilting, but the pickings are slim if you like bright, cheerful colors and less traditional patterns. If you like dark green, brown and maroon, pastel florals and teddy bears, you're in luck.

Unless I want to spend a fortune on designer fabrics in boutiques, which I don't, at least not for my first foray into quilting, I will either have to make do with what they've got at the local craft shop or drive out to the big (by Italian standards) fabric shop in Rosà, which about an hour away by car, so I have to plan accordingly.

In the meantime, as an experiment, I ordered a set of 16 fat quarters from an Etsy shop based in the US. The fabric is very pretty and reasonably priced compared to what it would cost here, even after shipping costs.

The quilt instructions said I'd need 12 FQs, and I figured I could maybe use the leftover 4 for the back? Or in case I mess up?

Anyway, the fabric should arrive next week and it will be interesting to see how all the pieces look laid out together and what the tax charge is when they deliver it (or summon me to pick it up at the least convenient customs office). I love the fabrics I chose, or at least the way they looked in pictures on my computer screen: lots of light green, some bright tangerine, and a little brown. I won't be using it right away, though.

This is because although the quilt I had in mind is rated easy, I am taking the advice of an expert and starting off with something smaller.

I will be following Barbara's tutorial for making a small quilt on Blimunda quilts. And although I would have loved my first quilt to be in one of her windmill patterns, which I adore, especially the orange and blue in her Etsy shop here, she is doing a simple square quilt that I think I should be able to handle. The top has "only" 135 small squares

Which brings us back to finding fabrics: I need eight! So it looks like I am going to need to organize a trip to that fabric store sometime soon. And decide on colors! And patterns!

This gives me something to think about while I put off working at my real job...