The progress on my just takes 2 mystery quilt has been painfully slow 🙁 The mystery quilt by Gay Bomers of http://www.sentimentalstitches.net and Brenda of Dear Jane ran through 2012, and the last set of the 100 blocks that make up this quilt, and suggestions for the border were revealed this month ! I am still stuck in April, May sometime! 🙁 🙁 🙁 But finally, I am planning to go full steam on it from tomorrow, so am making a record of blocks finished
Here are three hand -sewed blocks I finished since I last blogged about this quilt, months ago!
The first applique( Hawaiian look) block uses the back basting technique. I traced the pattern to the wrong side of the background and basted the applique piece over it, turning it in as I went along. It also has reverse appliqued diamonds in the centre.
Hand appliqued quilt block – back basting method used
The second block, Grandma’s Favourite Compass is paper pieced by the EPP method . The circle was hand sewed to the background.
Grandma’s Favourite Compass quilt block -English paper piecing and hand sewing
For the third block, I appliqued after tacking the leaves on to paper,like you would for EPP). I then slit the background fabric to remove the paper.
Hand appliqued Quilt block
Here are the first 28 blocks put together, to make up Section A of the quilt 🙂
Section A of justtakes2 quilt – first quarter of the quilt finished!
And here are some more completed blocks. The bottom left Cathedral windows block needs some more work, I just discovered!
Blocks from Section B of justtakes2 quilt
So this is where we stand today! I do have a few 4-patch strips that I have not photographed, but which count as blocks, anyways!
I have finished tracing out two more applique blocks – which will probably take me ages to finish! I shall sew them in the evenings, sitting in front of the TV. During the day, shall do the machined blocks!
Target – at least 2 blocks per day; 15 by Sunday! Also I am determined to finish all blocks of Section B during 2012…
At the end of each day, I shall post pics of the day’s progress! Do look in to have dekko and drop a line of encouragement!
The determination to win is the better part of winning. Daisaku Ikeda
What do you do as a quilter when you owe your Queen Bees something for their block parties? Try to sweeten up things a bit, right?
Queen Bee for Desi Quilters Bee Desi for September, Vidya had to wait till now for her block! For not killing me, she gets this little Scottie (whom she has named Patchy) to guard the felt farm animals she is making for her grand-daughter.
Scottie for Vidya
I had the pattern from my first patchwork book “All About Patchwork” (published Marshall Cavendish Ltd., London 1973).
It is made with 1.5″ squares from a jelly roll, partly machined, partly hand sewed; the ears and tail are paper pieced! It uses 92 squares – 30 for either side and 32 for the centre strip. I would highly recommend EPP if you decide to make this yourself. Sew the toy shapes first (remember to reverse the front and back!) and then join the 32 square strip.
My only regret – wish I had used brighter fabric for it – it should probably look delightful in bright solids.
October Queen Brinda deserved something for not asking me even once for her block. Since she celebrates Christmas in a big way, I made her this little festive quilt which could be used as a mat. Or she could use it as a wall quilt, if she added a sleeve.
Miniature Christmas Quilt
I was inspired by a mini-quilt I saw on flickr.com, but am sorry am unable to trace it now:-) Shall add the acknowledgement as soon as I find it again. The 4-patch blocks are 1.5″ square made by my easy/ quick 4-patch method, which I shall tell you about in another blog! The buntings are fused using Heat and Bond (red). A few buntings are 3-dimensional, made by adding fabric to the back and attaching them only on the top. Brinda is a great hand quilter, so I wanted to add a bit by hand to it. So I embroidered tiny motifs in gold thread. This was the first time I did whole quilt by my new Brother, so it is not as neat as I would wish, but…
So, we come to November.
Quilted cozy for scissors
I made a block in prints instead of solids for Queen Nirmala.
Back of scissors cozy
And made this little scissors cozy to make her feel a little better
(Psst…do you recognise the prints from Vidya’s Scottie? I used the one inch strip leftover from the jelly roll after cutting 1.5″ squares to make this 😉 )
For December, I was not late 🙂
But…the mess that I made of poor Elvira’s block is really nobody’s business. Besides cutting it wrong and sewing wrong pieces together, I had a lot of thread tension problems, which no amount of fiddling with the tension knob could sort. Adding to my woes, I could not find my 1/4″ seam! I would have made her another block, but I had no other black cotton thread and a friend told me it was not available in the market either. Perhaps Elvira, who sews so beautifully, will be able to tell me how to adjust my machine!
The only good thing was that I had a lot of hsts – a by-product of Elvira’s flying geese, besides a few rectangles left over. I decided to put them together to make a mini quilt for Elvira. I do think it looks quite Amish, I wish I had the confidence to do some more quilting on it!
Amish style miniature quilt. A little egg-cozy made by MIL poses with it !Back of Elvira’s mini quilt – with my mother’s play tea-set from 1937!
So those were the gifts I really enjoyed making! Before I sign off, here is wishing you all a very Merry Christmas!
Scrappy, quilted cozy for sewing scissors or shears
Here is a quick delightful last-minute gift you can whip up for a friend all in an afternoon, using your small scraps.
I made it from this book in the Hobby Craft Series that I have had forever! I have loved turning the pages and dreaming of making all those pretty things in it.
Have also made a few things like that little elephant I made into a bag for baby stuff when my son was an infant – the bottles went into the legs and tissues into the trunk! The cat I made into a pillow!
But one thing that I always wanted to make was this scissors cozy – with the instructions in Japanese.
Instructions for scissors cozy (in JapaThe
This would make an ideal gift for the queen bees in my virtual quilting bee! And English paper piecing or the paper foundation piecing method would be perfect for this, I decided.
For those of you looking for a quick and easy gift for someone who loves sewing, I am sharing how I went about making this delightful little cozy!
You will need
– 25 scraps of assorted fabric about 1.5″ X 2.5″
– 12″ X 8″ fabric or assorted scraps for back.
-12″ X 8″matching fabric for inner lining
– 30″ matching bias binding 1′ wide
– Two pieces of thick batting 12′ X 8″ and 10″ X 6.5″ for back and front respectively.
If you decide to do English paper piecing – Each of those small triangles has dimensions 0.75″ base and 1.5″ height. The top angle is 30 degrees; you can easily make a template on stiff card paper, using your quilting ruler or a protractor if you have one.
Use the template to draw 25 triangles on paper and cut them out very accurately. Ensure your fabric is starched real stiff! Place the paper triangles on wrong side of fabric and cut roughly 1/4 ” outside it. Tack the fabric to the paper. This comes up really fast 🙂
Follow the picture here to join 5 rows of 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9 triangles. To join, you place two triangles right side together and take tiny whip stitches along the edges to be joined. There are several excellent EPP tutes available on the net and on youtube!
If you decide to use the foundation paper method (like I did), the ready height of the front is 7.5″ and the base width is 3.75″. Follow the picture to make your foundation paper pattern. Trace out rows on separate strips of paper about 3″ wide and add 1/4′ seam allowance on either side of the row. Begin with the centre triangle as piece 1, adding on triangles on either side as you go along. When the rows are ready, trim them and join them up . I used hand sewing to join the rows for a more perfect finish. Here is what the front of my cozy looked like.
Front of scrappy scissors cozy
For the back, I decided to go for a scrappy look and joined up 1.5″ X 2.5″ rectangles in 7 vertical rows roughly in a triangle shape about 7″ wide at the base and 12″ in height. This is what my unfinished back looked like. Of course, you could use a single fabric to make the back.
Scrappy scissors cozy back
Then came the lining. I was at my stingiest best and stitched the lining into a tube along its longer side. I marked a point about 9″ on the seam and cut and cut it like this! The shorter piece with the seam would be used for the front inner lining and would not show up 🙂
The lining piece stitched into a tube and cut to get the front and back linings.Front and back lining – now iron the centre seam flat!
Add the batting and quilt each piece individually ( without trimming the back). I just quilted in the ditch.
Bind the front base only. ( I now drew a template 10.5 ” tall and 5.5 ” wide and trimmed the back.) Place the front and back together.
and do finer trimming if any required. Put the binding and you are ready! I also added a little loop on the back to facilitate hanging the scissors near my workplace.
Do ask me if anything is not clear, this tute assumes that you know the basics of EPP / foundation piecing! This is how my finished scissors cozy looked from the front…
Front of scissors cozyQuilted scissors cozy back
And here is the back! At the end of it all, I so fell in love with the cozy, that I decided not to send it to the Queen Bee :-p
Instead a made another one, this time for a pair of small scissors , pictured here!
Quilted cozy for scissorsBack of scissors cozy
I decided to quickly mail the gift and block to Queen Bee Nirmala, before I changed my mind, again! Hope this will make up for sending her a block made of printed fabric instead of solids like she wanted, and that too three weeks late 😉
I made this quilt for a challenge with my quilting group Desi Quilters, for which one had to make a quilt using strips. I had always wanted to make a Convergence Quilt and I had the perfect print for it!
For making Convergence quilts, a great resource is the book Ricky Tim’s Convergence Quilt available on Amazon.com. I found a great tutorial on Rafael’s Mum’s blogspot ” Adventures in Quilting and Sailing., and set out to work on my four fabrics. For those of you too lazy to go look up that blog , for a wall hanging / baby quilt about 40″ X 40″, you need two or more fabrics, though generally one uses 4 fabrics, like I did. So, the recipe is:
4 fat quarters of nicely contrasting fabric. It works best when the main fabric is a large diffused (all over ) print or batik with strongly contrasting colours.
1 yard 40- 44″ wide fabric for the border
1.5 yards of 40-44″ fabric for backing
48″ X 48″ batting ( I used an old woollen shawl :-))
So here are my four fabrics ( remembered to take a picture only after I had already started working on it)
Trying out arrangements for the quilt fabric
And here is the how the top would look once finished… I added a 1/4″ inner border to frame the strips, before adding a wide 7.5″ border (cut at 8″) on the outside.
Quilt top
I quite love it! As I was sewing it, a song kept playing in my head – no points for guessing which!
We would be warm,
Under the storm,
In our little hideaway
Beneath the waves…
So I had to get my Octopus. After browsing through hundreds of octopus images, I zeroed onto these two, that I absolutely adored:
I decided to base my Octopus on Debra Harry’s Octopus. For the fabric I turned to a Fossil Fern charms pack gifted to me by a wonderful friend Chumkie, from my Desi Quilters group.
I needed a range of shades in the same colour. Brighter for the tentacles in the foreground, and darker in the tentacles to the back. Also, the underside of the tentacles had to be a much lighter shade. It was like painting with fabric!
These are the various colour combinations I thought of –
I do not like purples and thought it would be good to get rid of them here 😉Pinks? Too predictable!Earthy browns? too dull…
( A good idea is to lay out your fabrics together and take a picture. You get a much better idea of what ‘clicks’ and what does not!
Once the decision for the fabric was made, I sketched the Octopus on newspaper and cut it out, placed it on the quilt to see how it looked. Too small! So I sketched a bigger one and that seemed just right. Sorry, I did not take pics of this stage either.
I then drew a grid on freezer paper – showing where the Octopus would be placed vis-a-vis the strips. You see, I wanted a few of the tentacles to come from behind the strips. [Secret – I had only charm squares to work with, so I could not have too long a piece anywhere 😉 ]
I the sketched my Octopus on the grid, freehand, as you can see!
Octopus sketched on freezer paper marked with quilt grid
Note that the image is the reverse (mirror image) of how it shall appear on the quilt. The top line is the upper border – I wanted a tentacle stealing out to the border! I numbered each tentacle, and each part that would be in a different fabric on that tentacle. 1, 2, 3, 4 would be the foreground tentacles in a brighter colour
A close up of the Octopus would explain what I am saying…
A close up of the Octopus to show the gradations in colour between the tentacles in the foreground and those at the back. The undersides were done in a lighter colour
Each small piece was then traced on to Heat n Bond Lite (pink), leaving an extra 1/6″ on the edge that was to be overlapped by another piece. All the pieces were laid on the fabric top, the paper removed one by one, and the fabric was ironed on to the quilt top.
I machine stitched it with invisible nylon thread on the top and white cotton in the bobbin. I could have been neater 🙁
Learning: Here I realised that I should have handled it one tentacle at a time. Ironed one (the lowermost), stitched it, then the next… because by the time I was through with ironing it, edges had started to come off! The very small pieces even came off as I was stitching. That is why a few of the tentacles are wonky! I suppose I should overstitch the edges with satin stitch, now that I own a Brother, but I think I like the raw edged look:-) Or maybe, I am just too lazy.
For the backing I had fabric that was just 36″ wide and a quilt nearly 44″ wide. So I decided to add a contrast turquoise to make it measure up! Alsa! The turquoise was also a yard width, and only a metre (40″). Eureka! add some of the main print from the front in the shape of a coral rock! I had always wanted to experiment with wavy edges – so they came in next. Here is the end result
Octopus Garden quilt back
I used an old shawl as the batting and quilted it with waves.
For the binding I joined the two solid backing fabrics and cut them diagonally to obtain a bias binding. Originally I machine stitched the binding ( from the back to the front!) because I was in a hurry. I thought it was quite hideous, and ripped, folding down the edges with invisible hemming.
So
I’d ask my friends to come and see
An Octopus’s Garden with me!
Octopus’s Garden Quilt
Of course, my Octopus has been christened Paul,after my favourite Beatle!
We’d sing and shout, and swim about the coral that lies beneath the waves…
I do plan to add some embellishment to this quilt, so watch this space… 🙂
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