Greenbelt Quilting Bee: The Silent Stars 2016 Quilt

Delighted to announce that Anne Bennett and I are hosting a new initiative at Greenbelt this year! The Greenbelt Quilting Bee  will take place on the Saturday afternoon of Greenbelt, 3-6pm, in the Christian Aid venue. (The Christian Aid theme this year is to do with making a home-from-home for refugees, so making a snuggly quilt seems particularly appropriate).

We will be making a Silent Stars Quilt, to reflect this year's Greenbelt theme. The idea is that ANYONE can have a go, from experienced quilters/sewers to children and complete novices!

How can you get involved?
Various ways!
1. If you are a complete beginner, just turn up and we will show you what to do! You can either do the REALLY simple (particularly child-friendly) option and simply draw a star on fabric, cut it out, and then add it to our quilt.

2. If you want a bit more of a challenge, you can learn English Paper Piecing. This is a traditional patchwork technique where small pieces of fabric are folded around paper templates, then sewn together edge to edge. Here is my daughter holding a demonstration star:

3. We will be adding the stars to the quilt but we will be Quilting As We Go, so you will also get to learn basic hand quilting skills! If you can sew on a button, you can do this. (If you can't sew on a button, I'm sure we can teach you quickly!).

4. Finally, if you are already an experienced quilter, there are two ways we would love you to get involved!

4.1 You are invited to make a star block, or star of your choice, in advance, and bring it along to Greenbelt to add to the quilt. All stars will be appliqued/quilted-as-you-go onto a quilt 'blank', so size is not critical. To guide your colour choices, we will be adding the stars to a navy blue background, so bright colours that would stand out will be best, and if you are using a background for your block, choose dark blue/black shades ideally.

4.2 And PLEASE, come along and join the bee and add your voice to ours as a guide, companion and instructor to those who are completely new to sewing! You don't have to be an expert, but if you can thread a needle and have ever quilted before you will be able to help explain the simple techniques to complete beginners.

Bookcase Quilt 'Pattern'

I've finally finished my improvised Bookcase Quilt! Several people have asked how to make it, and it was dead easy. So here are the instructions:

1. Choose at least three different sets of fabrics for three different shelves. How much you need of each depends on how big you want the quilt to be and how many fabrics you have! It helps to have at least one or two fabrics with a text based print.

You will also need bookcase fabric, enough for the shelves and edges (take into account the direction of the grain if appropriate), and a small amount of a darker shade for the places where the back of the bookcase shows behind some piles of books.

I also used a small collection of printed selvedges to make a pile of books. If you have many more selvedges that you've collected, you could incorporate these into your full shelves. You could even make an entire bookcase out of selvedges, as a library of all the fabrics you'd ever used - imagine that!

2. Cut the fabrics into strips of varying widths. If you have selvedges, leave them on. I used between 1" and 2.5". These strips will be the spines of your books, so you may want to think about the direction of the print for at least some of them.

3. If you wish, you can insert 'titles' into some (or even all) of the books at this point. I had a fat quarter of fabric printed as if it were vintage labels, and I fussy cut a few of these and inserted them into just three of the strips. To do this easily, cut that strip the same width as your fussy cut label (allowing for the seam allowance either side when you piece the strip next to others), and then just slash the strip and sew the label to form part of the strip. Alternatively, titles could be hand-embroidered on at a later stage, or you could print your own labels using your printer and specially treated fabric sheets?

4. Sew the strips together, lining up the ends at the edge without the selvedge, and letting the selvedges naturally stagger themselves at the other end. Don't bother pressing as you go, but alternate sewing up and down the strips to minimise a warp developing. Press at the end.

 

5. At this point, I cut the strip sheets in half horizontally, so that each strip sheet formed two similar shelves of books. One was a neat cut from the matched edges to the cutting line, the other had a neat base at the cutting line but a staggered top with various selvedges.

6. So now I had three completed rows of books (the straight cuts, the bottom three shelves), and three more raggedy string sets! The next step is to make the other shelves by using the remaining string sets and any other bits and pieces, appliqued and/or pieced together with the background fabric. I had three variations on the top three shelves. From top to bottom:

(a) I used most of a strip set as the width of my row, and cut a part of it off. I then added a wide strip of background fabric to complete the bookcase width, and then appliqued a small section of the strip set to it on an angle, to look like a few books leaning up against the rest.

(b) I sewed several selvedges together, topstitching through the selvedge edge onto the raw edge underlapping it, to make a 'pile of books'. I then attached this to the second row as before.

(c) the final row was made up of the raw staggered edges from one strip which had quite a few selvedges in it. If I'd planned this better I'd have made sure I used all selvedge edges on this row! As it was, I had to hand turn and hem quite a few of them. I added a strip of the background fabric behind the top edges and appliqued the whole top of the strip to it.





7. Cut the bookcase (brown in my case) fabric into strips for the shelves and piece together the book rows with the shelves (like sashing).

 8. Baste (I use spray glue), and quilt. I just quilted in the ditch along the shelves and between some of the books, and added a few hand quilted details of book bindings on some of the larger books.

9. Finally, use the bookcase fabric to bind the quilt, giving the effect of the edges of the bookcase.

Super Quick Strippy Quilt (Free Tutorial)

I bought a stash of co-ordinating fabric in a sale yesterday and challenged myself to make a quilt top out of it in what remained of the weekend!

This took a total of 7 hours.

I haven't quilted it yet (I've run out of glue spray to baste, bah), but I reckon if I had some I could have got the whole thing done in one weekend.

If you want to have a go at this super speedy quilt, here's what I did:

Materials: 9 half-metres of fabric, 3 each in 3 colourways (I had 3 different duck egg blue prints, 3 dusky purple prints, and 3 cream prints), plus 1.5m for the backing.

(This is enough to make a quilt roughly 52" by 64", and there is enough left over to do the binding and to also make a matching cushion or two from the scraps of the string pieced sheets).

1. Sort the 3 different colour sets of fabric out - two for the main strip set columns (blue and purple here) and one for the dividing colour (cream prints here).

2. Stacking the 3 coloured prints together, folding as necessary to fit on your cutting mat, cut down the grain (so the strips are 0.5 long) into 4" and 2" strips. I didn't use quite all the fabric - I had 6 of each strip (6 narrow and 6 wide of each print). Repeat for the other colourway.

3. From the cream prints, cut only 4" strips. You'll need 256" in total for a 64" long quilt (4x64) but I'd do a bit extra - maybe 270". Subcut these - I cut random lengths in the 6-12" range.

4. For each of the blue and purple strip sets, sew them together along their long (0.5m) edges to make a string sheet. I did this in a simple repeating pattern:

      Narrow strip of Print A
      Wide strip of Print B
      Narrow strip of Print C
      Wide strip of Print A
      Narrow strip of Print B
      Wide strip of Print C

5. Sew the cream strips together end to end to make 4 long strips each at least 64" long.

6. Press all seams (it helps the sewing together to press all the seams in the same direction on each string sheet).

7. Fold up the blue and purple string sheets lengthwise (so the folded pile is 0.5m wide and narrow enough to fit on your cutting board). Trim the ragged edges straight, and subcut into columns: I cut  the the blue string sheet into half (two columns of about 10" wide each), and the purple string sheet into two 4" columns and one wider 13" column.

8. Now simply arrange the columns and sew the long edges together.

9. A beautiful quilt top in about 7 hours - to be honest it might have been less, I kept having to get up and cook meals/deal with squealing children, so my counting wasn't that accurate!

10. Baste and quilt as desired. This is mainly fabric from a Lewis and Irene collection with bees in a meadow, so I plan to echo the subtle bee theme with a simple wandering clover free motion design - which also has the advantage of being very quick!

12 Hour Quilt

Last weekend I made a quilt in 12 hours!

Start to finish. Literally from getting the materials out of the bag and choosing which colours to use, to snipping off the last thread on the binding and handing it over to my son. (Although actually - as we'll see - there is a bit of binding that needs some attention....)

I got this book for Christmas:


Sherri Wood's 'The Improv Handbook for Modern Quilters' 

And having read it from cover to cover, I wanted to get stuck in! Sherri's style is almost totally improvised, and the book includes several different sets of ideas for quilts based on some of hers. She calls this ideas 'scores' - I found myself thinking of them more as algorithms. The idea is that you choose two or three constraints - fabric quantity, shape, or whatever - and then just take it from there!

The first 'score' in the book, and the one this quilt follows, is called Floating Squares. You start by choosing just three fabrics. I was stuck - so I added an element of randomness by asking my 10 year old son to choose three for me, from the bag of fabric fat quarters and remnants that was another of my Christmas presents (what a perfect present!).

He chose the orange batik, the brownish floral and the yellow that you see in the centre and top of the picture above. We then decided together that we would use half as much of the brown as of the orange. The yellow became the 'filler fabric' that the score calls for by default, as there was more of that than the others - about 3/4 metre, whereas the others were a fat quarter and a quarter yard remant which we cut in half.

Following the score, we then hand-cut rough squares from the orange and brown fabrics - again, I let him decide on the size. It is part of Sherri's style that you don't use rulers and don't worry about straight sides! Perfect for quilting with kids - frankly, I myself lose the will to live if I'm asked to measure 45 3" squares, so goodness knows how a child would cope.

You then simply add enough of the yellow to the squares to get them to fit together!

When I had run out of the orange and brown (basically the bottom half of the full quilt above, minus the last row or so), I said it could be a wall hanging. But my son then asked if it could be made a bit bigger and become a quilt for him!

So I found some other fabrics and kept going until I had run out of yellow. Making all the bits fit together when I had run out of yellow required a bit of thought, but I got there! It was still a bit small, so I added a deep border (around 6-8") of some fabric I had in my stash. It has ended up being exactly width of fabric wide, as that meant I could do the long sides first and then the short sides, log cabin style, with wof strips from the metre of fabric I had.

To get to this point had taken one afternoon and evening - about 6 hours.

The next day, I rooted around in my stash for some suitable backing fabric. I didn't have enough of any one, so again I improvised and cut one brown metre in half, and added enough of a similar black.

Then came the quilting....
I'm not very experienced at the actual quilting, and I felt I could easily have stalled at this stage and had it sitting on my unfinished projects shelf for months, if not years. But having bish-bash-boshed it so far, I wanted to keep going!

My son helped me do a quick-and-dirty spray glue basting on the kitchen floor. I was musing aloud about how I was going to quilt it when I only had black or white thread, neither of which I thought would go with the yellow top. 'Can't you just stitch along the lines of the joins, mum?' he asked. So that's what I did - not along all the lines, but along a path that I found as I went, stitching in the ditch with a walking foot. It has ended up looking rather digital, I think!

Then the binding. I found another brown fabric in my stash and cut the strips, sewed them to the front, and then thought - hmmm. If I hand sew this around the back it will never get done tonight, and I'd like to give it to my son before bed time.

So I had a go at machine binding it. I don't know if this is a 'proper' method, but what I did was fold the binding over, and clip it in place, making sure it was covering the line of stitching. Then I stitched in the ditch all around the front of the quilt, the theory being it wouldn't show on the front and would catch the back edge in.
It isn't the smartest binding in the world on the back, but it was quite good enough for my son!

There are about three places round the edge, though, where I didn't catch the edge properly, so I do still need to do a little hand sewing to sort those out. That, however, can wait!

So, there you have it - an improvised quilt in 12 hours flat!

The funny thing is, I was very ambivalent when I started this as I didn't really like the colours my son had chosen. But I now love the result! And I am totally sold on this improv quilting lark. In fact, no sooner had I finished this one than I started, that same night, on the next 'score' in the book! I have finished the top for that one, so watch this space...

Finishing a whole quilt like this has given me so much more confidence - I highly recommend getting the book and trying improv quilting for yourself - or just sewing a jelly roll together and finishing the whole thing in a weekend, for a confidence boost!

Winter Scene Mini Quilt Hanging - Attic Windows

Isn't this adorable? So chuffed with it!

Its a pattern from the Christmas issue of British Patchwork and Quilting magazine called Attic Windows. I couldn't find the single scene fabric they had used, but I managed to find these two, a winter village scene for the top of my scene and ice skaters for the foreground.

It was quite quick and simple, despite requiring some precision cutting to get those nice mitred corners (they are half-square triangles with the strips then added). The scenic squares are fussy cut and the whole thing goes together like a mini quilt, with the dark window frame forming the sashing.

I quilted it quite simply, first by stitching in the ditch along the window frames, and then adding some free motion quilting to suggest ice skating traces on the bottom six squares.

The whole thing is only about 14" square and I have it up as a little mini hanging at the moment. 

Quilting Durham Cathedral?

Am I mad to even be contemplating this?

I was in Durham Cathedral on Monday night, for Evensong with a party of German guests. it was the first time I have been sitting in the Choir since taking up quilting. I found my eyes drawn to the marble marquetry floor - and realised that I was basically looking at a medieval quilt. In stone.

Look at this corners: it is basically flying geese!

 I took some sneaky pics (naughty) while we were showing our guests round afterwards. And I am wondering about trying to actually make a quilt showcasing some of these gorgeous patterns.

Lovely border designs: the middle section could be a great quilt block, too.

Probably would need to use foundation paper piecing for the more complex areas, I suspect?

I'm wondering if FPP designed on a computer would be a good way of replicating these curves/pyramids?

So I will start thinking about this. It might take some time, but wouldn't a Durham Cathedral Quilt be amazing?

Baby Comfort Blanket

This week I turned a quilt square that I made earlier into a tactile comfort blankie for a friend's new baby. It was really surprisingly easy and quick!

 I took a quilt square - one of the string pieced ones I blogged about a few months ago - and sewed on various little ribbon tags around the edges.

I used a variety of different textures and sizes of ribbon.

Top tip - make sure, when you do this, that you sew them with the looped over end facing INWARDS (as in the photo)! Ahem - I did this for the first side, then realised I had sewn all the others with the loops facing out and had to chop them off and redo it.

Make sure that the bits of ribbon are not long enough to cause any sort of entanglement hazard. And I sewed them on with a double line of stitching, just to be double sure that they wouldn't come off when tugged and chewed.

I then laid a piece of baby fleece over the top of the whole thing (right sides together) and sewed all round the edge leaving a gap for turning, turned it the right way out and then handstitched the gap.

Stupidly, I then forgot to take a photo of the finished thing before giving it to mother and baby! But I'm sure you can imagine it. The lovely thing was that even though baby is far too small, at 4 days old, to be stroking and cuddling it yet, she clearly loved the kaleidoscopic patterns on the quilt square and her little eyes were scanning it busily!

The whole thing took less than an hour to make. If I'd had to make the quilt square from scratch, that would have added maybe another hour, but that still makes this a lovely little finish-in-an-evening project. I'm going to make more - I just need more friends to have babies now!

English paper piecing

The last quilt I showed you was a quilt for my eldest son ...this one is for my youngest, my daughter. (The middle son is having one made too, but that one is proving rather slow...blog to follow on the complexities of that one!). I've made the top, added the fleece, and am just beginning to quilt it.

This is actually the first one I started, back in February on my quilting retreat. We were introduced to various hand sewing techniques, and the EPP took me right back to making hexagons with my grandmother when I was about 8! I found it very meditative and quite mechanical - I didn't have to think about it too hard - so it was perfect for a retreat.

The great thing about EPP is that it is portable and you can do a tiny amount at a time.So you can sit on the sofa and make up some patches with the templates and fabric whilst watching telly. Or you can sew two together in 5 minutes, or make a whole star in 15 minutes (if you've already got the pieces prepared, maybe 30 if not). 

Whereas I find that the machined projects really need to be worked on for at least half an hour at a time in one go, and before you can start you have to have cleared the dining table, got the machine out, etc.

 This book was one that I was introduced to on the retreat. It is really good, and talks about portability a lot.

It was from here that I got the idea of the white interlocking background, which is created by adding two white diamonds to each star and then tessellating them.

One nice idea in here is doing a reverse of this quilt, with white stars and coloured background, and writing on each star in fabric pen where you made it, so it becomes a journal quilt!

The flip side of EPP being so meditative is that it does build up quite slowly as the pieces themselves are quite small. I am shallow enough to have decided that I'm using bigger diamonds next time, so it builds up quicker! I definitely got to the point where I wanted to complete this, rather than keep going and spend years building up a big enough collection of stars for a whole quilt. Luckily, I'd already decided I wanted to frame the design with other fabric, and it is very satisfying how doing that doubles the size of the quilt top very quickly.

I was originally going to frame it in just the white fabric with yellow stars and use the navy russian dolls fabric (that forms the narrow inner border) as the backing. But then my daughter saw my son's fleece-backed quilt (see that previous post) and decided she wanted a fleece backing too! And when I laid out the white starry fabric next to the pieced top it looked a bit anaemic - I'm very glad I thought of using the navy as an inner border, as it really makes the colours 'pop'.

I'm going to start another diamonds pattern, to have on the go, as it is so relaxing and easy to pick up and put down. At the moment I'm playing around with different flower/leaf/garden ideas, so I may make a fun sampler rather than a proper all-over design next.

Pentecost Stole

I made this last year for Pentecost and had almost forgotten about it when I suddenly remembered I would get to wear it again this year!

I'd just been on my first needle-felting course, and had got terribly excited about the potential for stole making. With beginner's zeal, I needle-felted the whole background cloth from a big carded bat, as well as then adding the design, which took AGES! I suspect I might be inclined to wet-felt - or use bought in felt as a backing - next time.

The design itself was loosely copied from a variety of images that I found online, and was done freehand. I initially didn't trust myself to do the dove straight onto the stole, so I made one separately intending to add it. However, I had miscalculated the width (or rather, the narrowness) of the stole, so it was far too big!

So this little bird ended up on a wall hanging above my children's bed, as they clamoured to have it looking after them at night, and I had to pluck up my courage and do another directly onto the stole.

What I particularly loved about doing the dove was the slight three-dimensionality that you can achieve with needle felting. The wings go over one another, and the body and head are a little rounded. There is also (though you can't really see it in these photos) a slight colour variation, as I added very pale pink and grey wool to the cream in different places, to highlight subtly the different parts of the dove.

I have found, though, that the stole doesn't tend to hang very straight - it is not really heavy enough. So before next year, I need to work out how to add some interlining to give it a bit more body. Any ideas or tips from anyone who has done this before would be very gratefully received!

My first finished quilt!

Here is my first finished quilt! Made for my eldest son, who requested 'grey' and 'not all flowery' and, most importantly, 'soft'.

In response to the last request, it is not traditionally wadded but backed with fleece. I'm sure this is taboo in all sorts of quilting circles, but he loves it! It also made my first ever attempt at the actual quilting relatively straightforward, as there could be quite big gaps between the quilt lines - I just quilted free form wavy lines across the quilt at about 2-3" intervals.

The hardest thing was actually managing the bulk of fabric through the sewing machine, as it is quite big! Goodness knows what it must be like using wadding...


I made the top using a 'jelly roll' of batik strips in a colour way called 'river rock'. The design is based on the idea I'd seen on the cover of a book of jelly roll quilts - just the strips, with additional strips of background fabric in random lengths sewn onto the ends to make it wider and give a staggered frame effect.

I'm really pleased with it! I did enjoy not having to do much cutting - probably my least favourite part of the whole process. So I will definitely use precut strips again. The simple long seams got a bit boring towards the end, though, so I'll probably mix it up a bit more next time - I might try a parquet squares effect with my next jelly roll?

String piecing

I have a new crush! I am totally in love with string piecing at the moment.

Each of these took an evening, maybe 2 or 2.5 hours. Which I think is pretty good, as they were the first thing like this I'd ever tried! It would be quicker next time, I'm sure.

I'm currently learning new quilting techniques by following a free Craftsy class. It is a Block of the Month course, where each month focuses on a different technique and you end up with a sampler quilt of 20 different blocks.

This month has been string foundation piecing, and it is brilliant! Have a look at the class here.

You simply cut a background piece of fabric and stitch 'strings' - strips of fabric in various widths - to it. It gives the most wonderful kaleidoscopic effects, and is almost ridiculously easy! I can't quite imagine making a whole quilt in half square triangles or some of the other fiddly techniques, but I could easily imagine making a whole one using this.

A Quilter's Prayer

Quilting God,
Take the ragbag of our lives -
Delve in, and pull out fistfuls -
The torn scraps of half-forgotten dreams,
Ragged fragments of failed plans,
Bits and pieces cut off, torn off,
Half-finished, regretted,
Or still taking shape.

Take blues of peacefulness and sorrow,
Greens of growing, playing, or envy,
Yellows of summer sun and sickness,
Whites of calm, quiet and cloud,
Reds of anger, pain and passion;
Greys of soft mist, old age and sorrow;
Scraps imprinted with memories -
A face here, a landscape there -

Quilting God,
Take these scraps of our lives
And combine them with the fibres of your story.
Pierce us with your sharp wisdom
So that, backed by your eternal presence,
Wadded with your incarnate fullness,
The thread of your indwelling spirit
Makes us one with you.

Wedding card

A mini-project today: making a wedding card for two friends getting married today.

For this, I used some scraps of pinky-purply felt that I had previously needle felted and then wet felted. I cut out two hearts, then quickly felted them together overlapping. I used a single needle and only a small amount of felting, as I wanted to keep the look and texture of two distinct hearts, but joined together as one.

I then sprinkled a small amount of gold strands over the top, and lightly felted them onto the surface just to give a little extra sparkle! I had originally planned to add initials or interlocking wedding rings, but when I laid them out they didn't look right, so I left it as it is.

Then just stuck it onto a plain card blank with glue dots - voila! It only took about 10 minutes and I'm really pleased with the result.

New Blog!

Hello! Welcome to my new blog, devoted to my new hobbies of quilting and felting.

I am very much a beginner!

I've been felting for just over a year. I've done bits and pieces of sewing over the years, including some patchwork as a child, and a few basic children's quilts over the last decade or so, but have just begun to get interested in quilting proper after attending a 'Quilting and Prayer' retreat run by the Creative Arts Retreat Movement.

So this isn't going to be an expert how-to blog, but a place for me to talk about and show off my works in progress, and link to those expert blogs that I'm enjoying!

I've always loved fabrics, textiles, and colour. I've tended to buy lovely bits of fabric and then stash them away, not really knowing what to do with them! What I love about both quilting and felting is the excuse to surround myself with colour and texture - both crafts are so tactile, and the house is now overflowing with gorgeous dyed wools and beautiful fabrics.

My current work in progress

I'm not a terribly precise person, so this isn't the place for exactly matching corners. I don't think I'm likely to be designing and making some of those incredibly complex quilts that fill me with awe, but also seem faintly sterile to me. I'm not a matchy-matchy sort of a person either, and I gather quilts that don't match are known as 'scrappy'. I rather like a hobby where 'scrappy' is a term of endearment and indeed a technical term, rather than a condemnation!