CHARM ABOUT YOU

This is an incredibly playfully stitched project and there are elements I absolutely love and also some lessons learned.

I was sent solid fabric in the colour Haze, Painter's Palette Solids by Paintbrush Studio. It's one of their 2019 colours of the year and it a beautiful grey blue. It looks different in the photos because of the time of day they were taken but the one below is possibly the closest to real life. The piece I'm stitching on is about 20" square. Aurifil also sent me a spool of 12wt thread, in #2612 Artic Sky - a lovely soft grey. 

I want to make every quilt in this book. The Seedling Quilts book is one to be savoured. I was thrilled to be asked by Jodi of Tales of Cloth to join the book tour as she has been an inspiration to me since we became blogging friends. I have always admired her sewing style, the way she combines fabrics and I LOVE her writing (so much I have actually embroidered a poem she wrote). She is endearing, interesting and very talented. 

It's no surprise then that this book is full of all that - gorgeous quilts, excellent advice, tidbits and stories of the herbs that the patterns are based on. There are 11 quilt patterns in the book but it's more than that, you can easily just make blocks or create sections based on the designs to use in other projects too.

I made the Peppermint pattern using Jodi's paper pieces, you can order kits of the papers for all the quilts in her shop. Choosing fabrics was not hard, they just jumped out of my stash at me. The grid print was the starting point because I thought the background of the pattern could look like a trellis for the plants to grow up.

The block were simple to sew, pre cut papers mean the pieces are super accurate. I took basted pieces with me on a train journey and snuck in sewing a block here and there. These could get addictive. Once I had made enough it was time to arrange the blocks and sew them together.

As I was making the blocks I realised that I didn't want to have to cut them top or bottom, which the original quilt pattern calls for. For a larger piece it makes sense but as this was a cushion I didn't want to lose any edges to the seam allowance. Appliqué is the best answer for me. I can keep the piece complete and it was a way for me to tame the (slightly busy) use of grid. The perfect background fabric was the one I picked up at the festival of quilts. Then there was the decision of how to do the appliqué and quilting. My favourite way is to quilt the background and then add the appliqué. It's something about the texture of doing it that way that I really like.

My youngest recently had her first wobbly tooth. I asked her if she wanted to help me pick fabrics out to make a tooth fairy cushion and she was very excited. Lois is very into pink and glitter and flowers. We thought about colour combinations and she said she liked the colours on her dress:

So we used that as a starting point, pulling out prints from my stash and she would give a yes or no. Once we had a few prints she got selective and basically chose every print that had a flower on it.

To let those prints shine, for the background I picked a plain canvas. Most often for cushions I use fusible fleece because of the slight structure it gives, it's so easy to use and you don't have to baste! The front and the back panels of the cushion were machine quilted with a cross hatch pattern using Aurifil Forty3, which gives a great texture.

I spent two days at the Festival of Quilts this year and it was fully all about friends for me. It's like a quilty friend reunion and this post is going to be unashamedly about the people I met and the friends I saw... with quilts and cool finds interspersed throughout. If you are looking for a blog post featuring all the beautiful quilts that were on display, this isn't it (sorry). You will certainly find pictures of all the quilts on social media, like here.

Friday

After a fun road trip down with my friends Michelle and Rachel we arrived in Birmingham (a bit later than expected thanks to traffic) on Friday and I went straight to find my friend Nicky. She made this amazing Expanding Universe Quilt with signature blocks from quilters that have contributed to Siblings Together.

My block is a cornerstone in the top right of the quilt but I'm too short to properly point at it. Cue the first of many friend selfies...

Next on my to do was visit my colleagues and friends at the Janome stand and of course to see the awesomeness that is this quilted jacket made by talented Lucy Engels.

I am madly in love with every aspect of this, the colours, the collar and cuffs, the log cabins and the texture of the quilting. It's the only quilted garment I've ever truly wanted to wear!

I also had to visit my friend Charlotte, we have known each other since we were in an online quilting bee ages ago and it's always nice to catch up. We also compared bee tattoos and I admired her beautiful bee dress!

I chose to follow the Shoal pattern and make some fish. Above you can see Nicholas' quilt and how beautiful the photography is in the book. 

My make is not a quilt but a cushion cover. As it's going to live with us I had to steer away from using blue because it wouldn't fit our decor (though fish mad Joan will probably steal it away to her room anyway!). I picked out background fabric while at Patchfinders recently, I could not resist the shot cotton. It's a mix of purple and mint, photos can not do it justice sadly. Because I can never restrain myself I also got the stripe, text and watercolour pink fabric too. I added another pop of bright colour with the yellow woven, Chartreuse Mariner Cloth by Alison Glass. 

Once the fabric pull was made cutting could begin!

This is the stack of quilts I took to Leicestershire and Rutland Guild, where I was invited to give a talk and teach a workshop. It's always exciting and slightly nerve wracking for me to visit somewhere new. All the ladies that weekend were so welcoming and it was great to arrive on their Area Day at the end of last month. It began with everyone working on their own projects and there was a wonderful show and tell. I really enjoy seeing peoples creations and hearing stories of how it was made. Sadly I didn't take pictures but it was a lovely mix of quilts, bags and more. All quite different and all beautiful! Later I did manage to snap this gorgeous pincushion, I would like to try the technique used on the top here as it's so pretty (sorry the lady's name who made this escapes me, please leave a comment if you know or if it was you and I will add credit).

There was never going to be a complete quilt in a day, though the progress was really impressive and all the blocks looked fabulous and very neat. Classic William Morris, Japanese woven fabric and an array of modern prints, they are all unique and wonderful.

You can really get a sense of how fabric placement can change the design. Fussy cuts work beautifully and using bright, dark or tonal shades can easily make different parts of the block stand out.

Imagine these blocks repeated, mixed with similar variations or contrasting joining blocks to make the quilt pattern. Beautiful!

If you'd like to make your own Crossed Orange Peel blocks or quilt, you can find the pattern - with a free hand piecing guide - HERE.  

It was a scorching hot weekend (similar to the current heatwave) so thank you to everyone that attended! Thank you all for being so welcoming, I thoroughly enjoyed the whole weekend. Special thanks to Sarah for organising my visit and for being such fun company.

This is one of those random posts about good stuff and things I like. A little bit of what's been going on and sharing a day off + day out I had with my husband recently.

Still busy and still teaching! This beautiful vintage Jones, zig zag machine was brought to class and while we did have a bit of trouble because of the position of the needle and feed for a 1/4" seam, it did power through some piecing. A lovely machine, just look at that wooden base unit.

Also a fine vintage, my Nan turned 101 last month. Here she is with her youngest great-grandson. She was in good form, singing Happy Birthday to ME when we all sang to her. She ate some cake and fussed over the kids. Possibly because my Grandad had a lovely head, I don't know, but she always comments on Fred's head - she says he has a good shaped head! We all had a nice time celebrating a special day.

With three rapidly growing children, work, general household chores and all the sewing, it is rare for me to have a day off. My husband and I decided to spend a day off together while the kids were at school, something we will definitely do again. We dropped them off at school and then decided to walk into Manchester city centre, grabbing a coffee on the way. Even on our first date we ended up walking and talking, it's one of my favourite things. So we strolled along and found our way to Whitworth Park, it was just before the art gallery opened so we hung out spotting the parakeets. 

My sewing is often influenced by my mood - for this project I was feeling happy, a sense of modern whimsy and wanting to reach for something NEW took over. As the pattern is my own and I have made a few versions now, that bit is familiar but you can still experiment with something you've made before. The needle case can be a quick make or a nice way to incorporate a bit of patchwork or embroidery.

This is why I decided to make another and test out some 'new to me' embroidery stitches. As it's only a small project and not on display, it doesn't really matter if it's not great or I found I didn't enjoy sewing certain stitches.

Wouldn't you know that the opposite became true?! I found three embroidery stitches I really like and, even though I didn't labour over my fabric choices, the mix of fabrics turned out well. There may need to be more snap decisions in my future.