Improvisation Quilt

I attended a workshop lead by Jenny Haynes quilter-extraordinaire at the Village Haberdashery in West Hampstead. They recently moved to a beautiful new building just opposite West Hampstead Underground Station which is flooded with light and lots of beautiful fabrics and craft supplies.

We were instructed to bring 0.25cm of four to five different coloured quilting weight cottons to create a improvisation quilt using contrasting fabrics. I already knew when I booked the course that the quilt I created in the workshop would be a baby quilt for my friend who is six months pregnant. I got prepared with some stealth research and found out what her and her partners favourite colours were; red, yellow, green and blue.

I was going to buy a selection of fabric for this course but a very surprizing and beautiful gift arrived from New York. My friend Kathy who I had met on the Janet Bolton workshop in January had sent me the full range of beautiful fat quarters of their current quilting cottons.

So I was set for the workshop. Jenny (in the photo above) showed us her beautiful chambray blues and yellow improvisation quilt and showed us a variety of quilting images to get inspired by. Jenny was a very encouraging tutor with lots of great ideas and little tips to help you along the way. Each workshop attendee (Sue, Sirini and myself) were all making different things and Jenny was great at helping each of us out with our projects.

The design of my quilt was inspired by a quilt that was made up of contrasting colours in small blocks. I spent about fifteen minutes exploring pairs of colours using the beautiful Andover fabrics that Kathy had gifted me.

I cut 10cm strips off the ends of the fat quarters and sewed the contrasting pairs together which were then cut into four sections.

The next step was to sew these collections of fabrics together into strips of eight. I then started to block out the order of the quilt by pinning it onto the very useful pin-wall by the side of the workshop tables. You can see the journey of the quilt below.

After sewing each section I ironed the seams, always ironing the lighter coloured fabric towards the darker coloured fabric. I then sewed long strips together across the quilt and finally sewed each strip to each other and the outcome was this:

When I got home I pinned the top-quilt and sandwiched the wadding between the backing fabric. I then hand-basted the quilt sewing from the centre outwards across the whole quilt to secure all three layers together. Sewing the hand-basting from the centre outwards keeps the layers even and avoids any ripples and shifts in the fabric sandwich!

You can see the dark threads of the hand-basting here

Next the slow and steady job of hand-quilting the fabric begins. The due date of my friends baby is in June so I have a decent amount of time to get this completed in good time. I will blog about the finished quilt in a month or so!

This post is linked to #handmademonday organised by Julia of Sum of their Stories.

Stash-Busting Patchwork Cushions

I was inspired to make my friend Charlotte a present for her flat when I saw her colourful bookcase. I also spotted this rather awesome mural on Carnaby Street which reminded me of patchwork. The two ideas merged into a fun stash-busting and selfless sewing project in the form of quilted patchwork cushions!

I had some charm packs of patchwork squares left over from when I made my friends Nik and Cheryl a purple and green baby quilt  and luckily the colours remaining were natural, orange, olive, coral and yellow which worked out perfectly.

I arranged the patchwork squares until I was happy with the composition then quickly sewed them together. It was at this point I realised I wanted to add an extra level of texture in the form of quilting. With good stash-busting karma I was very happy to have just enough quilting wadding left for the two cushions!

On one cushion I quilted a series of L shaped lines creating a cross effect on the front of the cushion whereas on the second I free-quilted parallel lines.

I am pretty happy with both cushions and I hope that my friend enjoys her present. I really enjoyed the time spent making these gifts and I think they will be very comfy additions to Charlotte's sofa!

First Baby Quilt Project

Two very good friends of mine are due a little baby in November and back in September I hatched a plan to sew them a quilt. Rather than a cutesy pastel-type baby quilt, I decided to base the palette upon their favourite colours of green and purple.

As it was my first quilting project I chose to use pre-cut Moda solid colour charm packs which I purchased from Ray Stitch in Islington alongside a metre and a half of lovely 100% organic and Fairtrade cotton for extra patches and the backing fabric. I also got just over a metre of organic cotton quilting batting too (£7.50).

I selected two sizes the Moda Solid Colour charm pack 5" and the 2.5" (£10 and £3.50). I used two and a half packs of the 5" and three packs of the 2.5" patches for my final design.

Selecting the colour palette. The charm-pack comes with the full rainbow spectrum so I omitted the reds, oranges and whites

Here are the many variants of design process I went through and I will show you the final result at the end.

First variation with a colour blend from Purple to green. I didn't think it had balance

This next version appears to be a random selection with greens, purples and all shades in-between placed with dark, mid and lighter shades distributed more evenly

Without the little patches I felt it looked a bit too plain!

Patchwork stacks. After establishing my chosen order I stacked them ready to sew together. I labelled them so I wouldn't forget the placement of the patches. You may notice the little patches have a log-cabin-esque border. I forgot about the seam allowances so when the four patches were sewn together they were too small to tesselate with the 5" patches. I had to buy a third 5" charm pack so I could create the borders for these little patches. I actually think made the quilt look better! 

Final order safety pinned ready for quilting.

Quilted with vertical lines running alongside the patches and a line in the centre (that runs through the middle of the little patches too). Green bias-binding has been pinned ready for sewing - think I am going to hand stitch it in place?

Close up of the patches and my slightly wonky quilting!

The final quilt. I am hand-sewing the binding. It may take some time!

What have you been sewing recently?
Have you started any Christmas gifts?
Or some super selfish sewing?