Plumbing was not numbing

A much longer than anticipated visit from the plumber (do you know where your stopcocks are?  If not, you might want to find out before your next plumber’s visit if you want to avoid looking as much of an idiot as I did) led to time for intermittent sewing.

Pat Archibald piece quilted simply with undulating lines with rayon threads, and bound with a pieced binding to continue the silhouette in to the binding.  I like the fact that I didn’t have to be accurate with the piecing due to the existing crenellations on the silhouette.

I also managed to scavenge enough thistle fabric to make a new cover for a very tatty looking cushion.  This felt very thrifty, as  I also re-used the zip from the revolting old one.

Festival of quilts

After a dash back from Cornwall, leaving my husband to coordinate other family travel ( and washing) for a trip to France,  I had 2 great days at Festival of Quilts. 

For the first time, I also managed to attend a workshop when I was there, with the great Pat Archibald.  We zoomed through making a sunset picture in fabric, although I was a bit hampered as much of my equipment had mistakenly gone back to London in the car.  Quilters being the people they are, everyone rallied round and I managed to borrow all that was required.  The result was this A4 piece, currently looking a bit battered as it has been stuffed in a bag for over a week.  Lots of artistic licence in the interpretation of the sunset colours.

As ever, I had problems with the “back to front and upside down – ness” of bondaweb with foiling, so my sun is a little more shimmery than originally intended.

One of the other participants took a slightly different approach and got a look of a waterside skyline.

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Purchases were limited to this lovely book by Janet Clare

and something I’ve been wanting to try for ages, a Thermofax screen for fabric printing.

Two birds for two boys

Details of centre quilting

Detail of border quilting

Centre front panel showing detail of quilting ( photographed before final embroidery of bird details)

 

Pieced back ( against the advice of Plum, sorry!)

 

Front, abut 48 x 60 inches.

This quilt has been a long time in the making. It is a gift for my artist friend, in exchange for pencil portraits of my sons.  I did have two abortive starts on this gift, and both of those semi-complete tops are now in the ongoing project pile.  The central panel is from  a design in Material Obsession, with the tree trunk made from a horded piece of Joel Dewberry woodgrain fabric. Then I randomly pieced many, many rectangles in green and yellow.  I did not have enough of the light green leaf fabric for the back, so decided to make a pieced background, against all advice.

Free machine quilted with a selection of threads, mostly Bottomline, and with bird-related sayings quilted into the dark green inner border ( not seen well on this photo).  Other quilting patterns were either quilted without marking or drawn freehand and were inspired by Philippa Naylor.  Binding was embroidered as shown in the last post.

It looks a bit puffy in the bottom photograph, but it doesn’t in real life.

I’ve loved every minute of making this quilt, hope you enjoy it, Tracey.

Embroidered binding, almost a finish

When I saw the quilts of Philippa Naylor, I was very impressed with her embroidered quilt bindings.  As I am almost at the end of making the quilt mentioned previously and wanted to make it extra special, I made an embroidered binding.  Not as spectacular as Philippa’s FMQ binding, as this was done using one of the stitches on my machine, but a good effect, all the same.  One to repeat I think.