hollyhocks

Slow quilting by hand, using the double baptist fan template. Cotton batting, dark purple no 16 perle cotton thread. Lovely texture. A very happy quilt. 

My Hollyhocks finished at 60" * 72"

This quilt is a little homage to the Norwegian painter Kjell Pahr Iversen. His colourful paintings, especially a series he named Icons, inspired me to take up quilting. Paint or fabric - just two different tools for expression - right?

If you look at the previous blogpost, the Madhouse blocks started out with a pentagon center. These Hollyhock blocks start out with a hexagon center. Variation on a theme. Which I have realised I often do. Do you?

something small

scrap buster medallion

A public photoshoot on a sunny october day by the sea,  airing the newly finished "scrap buster medallion" and taking advantage of having an extra pair of hands / capable photographer helping out. The quilt finishes at 60" by 80", is hand-quilted with perle cotton no 16 on a soft and lovely hobbs cotton batting. 

This one have been 6 years in the making, including a long hibernation waiting for me to find a way to make it a bit wider. The aqua frame was added this spring, using small fussy-cut motives from the african butterfly print by alexander henry I used for the back. 

It feels a bit strange bringing your creation out in the open. It is a good way to display a bigger quilt if you don't have a big garden of your own. I always appreciate the way daylight presents the colours of the quilts. So hopefully this first will not be the last outdoor in public photoshoot adventure for me...

; )

vertical

Vertical basting - basting on the wall. My latest quilt top "vertical", composed of horizontal rows of strings of different widths. Scrappy. Green with accompanying yellow / orange and pink.  

About 60" * 80". Quilters Dream Select cotton batting. Pinning standing up or sitting / standing on a chair... Considering how to quilt it.

Can you believe this is my post number 400! Thank you all for being part of my blogging with kind and lovely comments and questions over the years.  To celebrate I want to share how to do this vertical basting.

A short picture tutorial:

• the backing up first, curtain clips and painters tape
• the batting up second, same curtain clips, just smoothed out with the quilting ruler after softening the crinkles with a short spin in the dryer
• the quilt top up last, sticking to the batting, being smoothed out with the same ruler until satisfying result is achieved
• pinning as close as prefered

not shown: removing the quilt sandwich from the wall, cutting off excess batting (leaving at least 2" extra batting and 4" extra backing. Folding up the excess backing over the excess batting and thread basting the edge. This prevents loose fibers on your clothing while handling or hand-quilting.

Wish you all a beautiful Sunday!

; )

windy

Photoshoot on a windy afternoon. Stargazing with Amy finishes at 28" * 36", quilted with perle cotton on Quilters Dream Request batting using big baptist fan stencil to mark the quilting lines.

The blocks are made of spare parts from a previous quilt: Sizzix stars. They are purposely fragmented with star points swapped between them. Dark on light background and the other way around. Quite playful or chaotic, depending on the observer... 

I think of this as a sketch, wanting to experiment with other colorways and other fabrics than quilting cottons. Another result from emptying out the boxes of pre-cuts, wip's and ufo's. That's the theme of 2016 for me so far...

; )

Happy stitching to all!

fiesta, forever...

A few snap shots of  my fiesta, forever... from a freezing outdoor photoshoot. The quilt is big, 64" * 80" using quilters dream poly batting and a fun alexander henry print as a back. Not easy to capture in good light this time of the year.  More lively in real life than in these pictures, I'd say...

This has been a long term scrappy project, based on the lovely pattern scrapper's delight from the book sunday morning quilts. It is a mix of blocks with very random strips of colors, and blocks with more coordinated colors. As I was putting this wip up on my design wall after finishing ziggy stardust (previous post), the inspiration hit to try a similar layout. 

Some of these blocks have had several different tryouts for other layouts over time, some are freshly made for this one. A lucky find of light blue solid from stash pulled it all together. The back has been waiting patiently in stash, too. It's a mexican themed dia del morte, fun print. (There's a little showing in the middle picture, above.) As much as I would like this one quilted on a long arm, I decided to try it myself. ( The back was not big enough for the extra inches needed to attach it to the long arm.) So, using all the different colors of thread to quilt the different colored strips I took my time and quilted it over several days, a few hours at a time. 

Happy with the result. The vivid colors complement the "fastelaven" (norwegian custom similar to carnival season) and easter season both. A good dose of colors are just what I need this time of year.

; )

easter treats

Simple blocks, simple playing with colors, .... and some slow hand quilting.
The colors are inspired by the tempting pastels of a favorite easter candy.

The blocks are partly a result of cleaning out the scrap boxes of saved selvedges. And then stripping them of the selvedge. Ending up with a good variety of skinny strips. Adding wider strips out of the bin holding scrappy strips. Then cutting a lot of 2.5" strips of the main color. Here it is yellow for easter. Making sure there's plenty of variety. And sub cutting them into a suitable length for their final measure of 6"squares.

Sewing the blocks was bliss. Easy, just pairing two and two strips. Then connecting them with a middle one. Ironing all the seams to one side. Squaring them up, they look surprisingly pretty. All 50 of them. Finding their place in a few tabletops. Getting in line to be quilted. First and smallest quilt will be done soon. The rest of them will hopefully be part of decorating the table for easter. If not this year then maybe next?

; )

friday finish

Finally a friday finish to share:

my pushing up daisies is 67" by 85"

partly quilted by hand (the background) and partly by machine (the daisies)

started a year ago, inspired by Kathy Doughty's quilt garden party from her book making quilts.

My aim was to use the growing pile of scraps and bigger left over pieces of blue and green. I also finally got a chance to play with the dresden block. The process has taken some time, including a bit of considering how to proceed. The background came together fairly quick after grouping my scraps by color, the dresdens took quite a bit longer to materialize. This design is a play in contrasts of value. Some of the daisies blend into the background, others seam lifted out from the background. I spent a long time playing around with placement of the daisies. 

The binding is also quite scrappy, as I happily cleaned out the leftover green and blue excess pieces of binding that I keep in a little plastic box, all cut at 1.25"

This quilt is very soft due to the hand quilting and the thin cotton batting. (quilters dream request). And I am still considering adding some quilting to the yellow flower centers (which is just hand sewn to the petals,) either by hand or by machine. For now I am just happy to snuggle up and test it

; )

Happy friday!