November Round -Up

This month has been about making two Disappearing Nine-Patch quilts for my grandchildren for Christmas.  I've completed one and am almost finished hand quilting the other so have high hopes they will be ready for the big day. I've also started Lori Holt's Quilty Fun Sew Along and have completed the first four blocks, and I've managed a couple of blocks for my Farmer's Wife Sampler quilt.

Pretty in Pink Ta-daaah!

All finished and ready to wrap for Christmas.

I am so pleased with how this has turned out.  Ever since I started quilting just over a year ago I've been longing to make a pink scrappy quilt for my little granddaughter, but I've had to wait until I had collected enough scraps.  The scraps have come from old sheets, a shirt or two, oddments from friends and a few bits of old dressmaking stuff. I love this little patch of Alice in Wonderland fabric.

I added some Kona Snow and some pink spotty stuff from Ikea to tie it all together.

I used the Disappearing Nine-Patch pattern which is so easy to do.  Just cut squares, stitch them together, cut them up, turn them this way and that, restitch and then you have a pattern that looks far more complicated than it really is.  I wrote more about how to do this here.

My grandchildren love to sit and watch TV with a blanket on their laps.  At the moment they usually drag the crochet blankets I made for them off their beds, so I thought it would be a good idea to make them a quilt just for TV watching.  I've made this quite light weight as it has no batting, just a light fleecy throw, from Ikea, for a backing.

The quilting is a mixture of hand and machine.  I used the machine to stitch-in-the-ditch six inches apart across the length and width and then big-stitch-quilting a quarter inch in around all the white blocks using a pink top stitch thread by Guttermaan.  I would have liked a slightly darker pink thread so that it showed up a bit more, but I had to go with what my local shop had.

I finished it off by binding it with the pink spotty stuff from Ikea.  I must get some more of this 'cause I love it so much.

I've now started the hand quilting on the boy version of this quilt for my grandson, so as it's big-stitch-quilting it shouldn't take too long.

This week I've also made the next block in Lori Holt's Quilty Fun Sew Along.  This week it is Twinkling Stars.  I spy some more of that pink spotty stuff.

Flower Basket and October Round-up

There are several basket blocks in the Farmer's Wife Sampler Quilt book, but none of them appealed to me.  Two of them have appliqued handles, so that's a 'no' from me (I know my limitations) and the grape basket is made up of 5 x 5 squares which makes it difficult to rotary cut as I'm not using templates.  So I decided to draft out my own basket.  I drew out a 4 x 4 block onto squared paper and took elements from other basket blocks I've seen.  After many attempts I came up with this.

Actuallly, this is how I do all my blocks.  Every block is copied from the book onto my squared paper pad and I work out the measurements and method of working for each one.  My scale is 1 tiny square = 1/2 inch and then I add on the 1/4 inch seam allowance.  Some of the blocks in the book are a bit too complicated to do it with this method, but I'm only making 50 blocks so I'm picking out the easier ones.

And here it is.  It actually took me less time to cut and piece this than it did to draft it out, but it was worth it in the end.

I've finished the big stitch quilting on 'Pretty in Pink' and only need to finish the hand sewing on the binding.
I've also made the blocks for the boy version of this one from old shirts so that will get put together this weekend and then will be ready for some hand quilting.

October was about getting Pretty in Pink pieced together but I've made a FWS block each week as well, so here's the collage for October.

Pretty in Pink

After finishing the scrap sorting last week I was eager to start a new project, so I decided to make a start on using up some scraps..  Do you remember the pile of 5" squares I had cut?

There were 80 squares in that pink pile on the left and were calling me to make something for my granddaughter whose favourite colour just happens to be pink.  I wanted something that would be scrappy, but still have a unified look to it.  I hunted around the internet, and my Pinterest boards and decided on the Disappearing Nine-Patch block.  I already had two charm packs of Kona white so they could be used, and I found some pink and red spot fabric in my stash I'd bought in Ikea earlier this year.  The white and the spot would be in every block.  I made each block using four scrap squares for the corners, one pink spot square for each centre, and four white squares for the outer middle squares.  That sounds complicated but as a picture paints a thousand words here's one to show you what I mean.

I made twenty blocks like this. Chain-piecing them meant they came together so quickly.  I really surprised myself how quick it was.  Then came the fun part.  I cut through the middle of the block, both vertically and horizontally like this.

Then I rotated the top left and the bottom right squares through 180 degrees, leaving the other two squares alone.  They now looked like this.

This was then sewn together to make the completed block.

The block measured 13 1/2" square, which when set in a 4x5 formation and sewn together would be just a bit too big for the fleece throw I want to use for the backing, so I trimmed the blocks down to 12 1/2", making sure I measured 6 1/4" from the centre line on all four sides so that I kept the pattern equal.

 The completed top. I love the way the cut white blocks form that cross pattern.  I'm thinking I'll hand quilt around the inside of those crosses to emphasise them a bit more.

 Although not completely made from scraps, I'm putting this down as another item for the Scrap Challenge.