Catch All Caddy 2.0

I've got another finished bag to share with you.  

This is the Catch All Caddy 2.0 from Patterns by Annie.

I gave my mum the pattern for Christmas and the fabrics for her bag (Land Art by Odile Bailloeul for Free Spirit Fabrics), shown on the left above.  

Then, after just a few days, it dawned on me that she might make one for me too, so I quilted the panels for my bag before mum went home to Auckland.  She took them with her, and when we went to Auckland a couple of weeks ago she presented me with my finished bag. 

This bag has so many pockets!  I'm looking forward to using it when I go to our guild's retreat next weekend.  I think it will be ideal for storing fat quarters, plus rotary cutters, scissors etc.  

My bag is made with beautiful Art Gallery fabrics from the Legendary collection by Pat Bravo.  I bought them at Material Obsession in Sydney last year.  The bright yellow trim is also by Pat Bravo from her Matchmade range. 

Fortunately I had the perfect Aurifil colour for the machine quilting:

  Mum has decided that her Catch All Caddy is very useful for holding her knitting.

So, were both very happy with our matching Catch All Caddies. 

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

Holiday Sewing Part 3 - Mirage

Yes, there's still more from my Christmas holiday sewing with my mum.

You probably know by now that I can't resist a bright pop of colour, so sometime ago I bought two sections of a Mirage panel by Northcott. 

While mum was here I suddenly had an urge to turn one of them into a wall hanging for my home office.  I decided to practice on the spare piece first, so I machine quilted it along the lines with my walking foot and verigated thread.

As usual, it took longer than I expected, but it was the holidays, so it didn't matter.

Mum kindly sewed down the binding, put on the label, and added the hanging sleeve (all those finishing jobs which take time).  She's taken the practice one home to hang in the spare room at her house, and one day I'll turn the other piece into a wall hanging for my home office. 

Here's the selvage in case you want to track it down.

If you didn't know it was a panel, you'd think it was pieced because the quilting makes the triangles pop.

Modern Hexies Rainbow

Last week I finished my Modern Hexies Rainbow.

This table runner / wall hanging is made using a technique made popular by Nicole Daksiewicz of Modern Handcraft. You can find her tutorial here.

I decided to made a rainbow wall hanging because I loved the thought of the bright hexies against the grey Heath fabric from Alexander Henry.  I had some Heath left over from my Wheel of Fortune mini quilt.

I recycled the 1" hexie papers I used to make Honeycomb Spin. They are called 1" hexies because each side is 1" long (that's how paper pieces are measured).

And for my final thrifty step, I dug through my scraps and cut a hexie from each of the RPYGBIV fabrics I came across. So this quilt is made entirely from things I already had at home.

Getting the hexies evenly spaced is the trickiest part of this design.  I had already made a mini quilt just to try out this technique (see below), and I knew the hexies had to be straight so the quilting lines could run through them nicely. I like to use my long ruler to keep the rows evenly spaced.

The hexies are all glued down with Roxanne's glue, and then machine quilted, so they are quite secure.

I decided to quilt with a variegated Auriful thread I had on hand.  I thought that white thread would highlight any crooked lines in the quilting, and dark colours might just disappear into the grey.  So I decided to compromise and use a variegated thread.
 

I marked lines with my hera marker, but they were difficult to see on the grey Heath fabric, so I resorted to using a chalk pencil too.

When it came to the binding I was really stuck.  Did I want black and white to let the hexies shine? Or did I want a bright colour? And if so, which colour? Mulitcolour just looked crazy.

So I went to my local quilt shop, Nancy's Stitch Studio, and the owner Mary Self suggested black and white with pops of colour.  I loved that idea, but was worried that a pop of colour might end up on the corner bend and be very bulky.  Mary said that sometimes she just makes up the binding as she is sewing it onto the quilt! What a rebel!! Why hadn't I thought of that?  Anyway, that's what I did.  I started with a little bit of quilt maths, but then made it up as I went along.  Thank you Mary!

Unfortunatley the grey background is very hard to photograph.  It looks dark in some photos and light in others.  Trust me - it's really nice in real life.

Finished size 40" x 20"

Online Bloggers' Quilt Festival - Spinning Stripes

It's time for the Bloggers' Quilt Festival again, and once again I'm entering two quilts.

The first is my Spinning Stripes, which I finished in September.  I'm entering this quilt in the Mini Quilt section.

I learnt to make this quilt in a class run by my friend, Shirley Mooney.  She showed us how to turn this single piece of fabric into a stunning mini quilt.

I machine quilted this mini myself.  I spread the quilting over two weeks because there were so many ends to bury.

I'm really pleased with how this quilt turned out. It's my favourite greens and blues, and it's a very interesting design.  I have another version already cut and ready to piece soon.

This mini quilt measures 22" across.  Thank you for visiting.

Bloggers' Quilt Festival - Trellis Crossroads

Hello and welcome. I'm Wendy and this is my second entry in the Bloggers' Quilt Festival. This is my Trellis Crossroads quilt that I finished a few weeks ago. I'm entering it into the Home Machine Quilted category. 

Trellis Crossroads

I love bright colours, and I've used plenty of them my Trellis Crossroads quilt.  I started this quilt to try out the Trellis Crossroads pattern, but I loved how the bright batiks looked against the navy, so I kept going until I had used up all my batik charm squares.

I used hot pink for the quilting because I knew it would stand out against the navy background. I used my walking foot to quilt diamonds with straight line machine quilting. Once I reached the edges of the quilt I changed to straight lines radiating out to the four corners.

I added a little bit of hand quilting in the centre with a thicker thread as an accent.

This quilt is quite small - just 38" x 38". It's now hanging on the wall in the hall way of our home, and looks very welcoming when visitors come to the door.

You can read more about this quilt in my earlier post here. And you can see my other entry in the Bloggers Quilt Festival here - my Redwork Christmas.

Thank you for visiting.

Trellis Crossroads mini is finished

I'm happy to say that my Trellis Crossroads mini quilt is finished and ready to be hung in the hallway.

Trellis Crossroads in Batiks

This quilt started out because I'd seen other people making Trellis Crossroads blocks for hive challenges and I thought they looked interesting. I just wanted to try one of these blocks so I got hold of the book Modern Bee by Lindsay Connor.  Of course, once I started I wanted to keep to going and ended up making more.

I had a charm pack of bright batiks that I'd had for a while and some navy batik to go with them, so I worked out how many blocks I could make, and just kept going until I had used up all the charm squares. You can read more about my process in my earlier post here.

Machine and Hand quilting combined

At first I intended to straight line machine quilt this quilt with a walking foot. But then I realised that the points didn't meet perfectly on all the blocks, and I thought I could work around that better with hand quilting. I like to hand quilt with a thick thread and a large needle, but I had great difficulty getting the needle through these batiks.

That caused me to rethink the machine quilting option and this quilt has ended up a combination of both methods. I used two different types of bright pink thread for the quilting. The hand quilting thread was a Rayon called "Razzle" by Wonderfil. The machine quilting thread was "Polyneon" by Madeira.

The back with sleeves at the top and bottom.

I put two sleeves on the back so I can insert some 8mm dowling into the top and bottom and hang it on the wall. I like to put dowling in the bottom too because it keeps the quilt hanging nicely.

This is why I had so many ends to darn in on the machine quilting

The facts:
Pattern: Trellis Crossroads from the book Modern Bee by Lindsay Connor
Fabrics: all batiks
Size: 38" x 38"

A progress report

I've been working on quite a few different projects over the last week. On the quilting side I've finished the machine quilting on my Trellis Crossroads batik quilt, and only have to put on the binding, sleeves and label now. I love how this quilt looks, but I will not be working with batiks again in the near future. Hand quilting was nearly impossible, and even machine quilting was difficult because the fabric is quite slippery. Anyway, I'm very happy with how it looks.

I don't know if this qualifies as match stick quilting or not. My lines are 0.5" and 0.75" apart. I quilted out from the central diamond, and then out to the edges.

I had two people tell me to darn the ends in, so I did that. Is that what everyone else does, or do you just cut them off close to the quilt? I'd be interested to know.

I'm surprised at how long it took to machine quilt using this method. My friend Jo used Free Motion stipple quilting on a whole quilt and it only took her one hour. This quilt is only 40" by 40" and it took quite a few hours for the machine quilting.

On Saturday I attended the first Needlelace lesson, and as expected, made minimal progress.

Yes, this is two hours work, but I did get instructions on how to make all of the middle flower before the next lesson in a month's time, and how to prepare the base for another flower. Since Saturday morning I've done a bit more:

two rows of button hole stitch on the outer ring

My eyes do get tired doing this, so I've been swapping to my Northern Expressions Needlework Celtic Snow piece when that happens:

Celtic Snow by Northern Expressions Needlework

Yes, both of these pieces are on the same lovely hand dyed linen. I ordered it for the Celtic Snow, and found I had enough left over for the Needlelace. The threads are light for one and dark for the other, so the fact that I've just the same linen will hardly be noticeable when they are finished.

I hope you have a good week and get lots done. School holidays start next week for us and I will be driving my boys to study tutorials and cricket coaching, so I don't expect to get a lot done then.