Coffee in a Kaffe cup

This week I've been working on my Tea Party quilt.  How I wish I had coffee cups like this at my house!

and shiny tea cups like this too.

I think they work well with my tea pot.

I've still got to applique flowers on to all of these blocks, but I'm happy that I've finally decided on my cups and tea pot.  Although I do like the softer colours used in the pattern, I like the darker cups and tea pot even more. 

I've added the finishing touches to some of the other blocks too.  There are 8 of these plainer blocks, and I've finished 3 of them.  

It's true, I do love fiddling about with fabric and threads.  Cutting and sewing these circles on made me happy this week. 

Now it's time for the Peacock Party.  What have you been up to this week? Feel free to link up a recent blog post below. 

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

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Material Girl

I have another finish to share with you today.  

This is "Material Girl", a quilt that I started in a class with Anna Maria Horner back in November 2019, in Wellington, New Zealand.  It's based on Anna Maria's pattern called Cross Country. 

My plan was to use a lot of Anna Maria Horner's fabrics in this quilt, but somehow I gravitated back to my Kaffe Fassett favourites as you can see below!

I spend so long dithering over what to put in the large side triangles.  I eventually decided on Cactus Flower by Kaffe Fassett and I'm very pleased with that decision. 

I decided not to hand quilt this quilt.  Instead, I took it to my friend Rayna Clinton of Tui Song Quilting in Wellington, and together we chose a flowing edge to edge design.

Now that it's finished I can see that the quilting almost disappears due to the highly patterned fabrics, so I'm very glad that I didn't choose to hand quilt it. 

I do LOVE the back. It's a Kaffe Fassett wideback called Full Blown.

The Cross Country pattern has three major variations.  Anna Maria carried all three quilts to New Zealand to show us - plus more!

I instantly knew that I liked the third variation, so that's the one that I chose to make. I like to have lots of different fabrics in my quilts, and the third variation allowed for that. 

I started off with this centre in the class:

But when I got home I struggled to extend it out, so I started again with this centre and it felt much more natural for me. I do like to challenge myself to try different things, but sometimes I just have to give up and go with what I know will work. 

Here's a link back to my post on the class I attended in November 2019 with Anna Maria Horner. Click here. 

Finished size is 72" x 72" 

Now it's time for the Peacock Party.  Feel free to link up a recent blog post below.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

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Green Diamonds

I've decided that I'm tired of walking past this quilt every day, so it's time to finish it.  

I did have grand plans to use this quilt as a hand quilting sampler, but I really don't like hand quilting through cotton batting.

I prefer to use wool batting when I'm hand quilting, but I must have had a piece of cotton batting lying around that fitted perfectly, so I used cotton batting this time.

I can see that pieces of the batting are pulling through with my stitches when I'm using the thicker threads like Perle 8 and Aurifil 12wt.  And I don't want wispy white bits of batting on the surface of my quilt.  

So I unpicked the small bit of hand quilting I'd done on the borders, and last weekend I just did four straight rows of machine quilting with my walking foot.  They're barely visible, but I needed some quilting on the borders, and it was the borders that were preventing me from finishing this quilt. 

There's still a bit more hand quilting to do in the middle, but it should be finished in a few weeks now. I'll be sure to show you the whole quilt when it's finished.  It's just a small one - lap sized.  

I actually started this quilt in a class with Kaffe and Brandon back in January 2018.  My end result is going to be quite different from where I started out. You can read an earlier post about it here.  

Now it's time for the Peacock Party.  Feel free to link up a recent blog post below.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

Tea Party quilt - part 2

Shirley from Zipzog blog in the Netherlands got in touch after my post last week, and told me that she had made the Tea Party quilt with some friends.  Here's Shirley's finished quilt.  It's gorgeous!

by Shirley of Zipzop blog

You've inspired me to keep going Shirley!

I've finally chosen my fabric for the tea pot.  I feel that the tea pot sets the tone for the rest of the quilt, so it needed to be right.  I've chosen the flowery fabric at the bottom in the photo below. 

There are 16 large blocks around the outside, and I've pieced six of them so far.   I've decided to machine piece all the blocks before I start adding the decorative wool felt applique.  

Most of these fabrics are the ones supplied in the Block of the Month packs, but I have decided to change the outer borders on some of the blocks.  This green above is from my own stash, and I'm going to make more substitutions in coming blocks.  I don't want too much orange in my quilt.  

So that's where I'm at.  We've had a slight easing of lockdown restrictions where I live in Wellington, but the only real difference is that we can have takeaway food now - coffees, fish and chips, McDonalds etc, and order more things online. Office workers are still all working from home. 

Now it's time for the Peacock Party.  What have you been up to this week? Feel free to link up a recent blog post below. 

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter