Archive for June 2010

Bird mini quilt

In Quilting on 28 June 2010 with no comments

Last week’s pro­ject involved the mer­ging of two sketches into a mini-quilt, using one of my most favour­ite fab­rics, Cecelia from Ikea. It’s also my first foray into hand quilt­ing. After vis­it­ing the V&A quilt exhib­i­tion, I really wanted to hand quilt some­thing — I doubt this’ll be in the V&A in 300 years, and I’m not sure I ever see me hand quilt­ing an actual full-sized quilt, but I love the effect so much more than machine quilting.

Energy levels are low at the moment, but everything’s still get­ting done.… even­tu­ally. Just a little bit more slowly. Still, at least if there’s an alien inva­sion and only the people who have cut out 208 cream 9cm fab­ric squares can sur­vive, we’ll be okay:

Quilt is done!

In Uncategorized on 10 June 2010 with no comments

Sci­ence fact: all of the best interi­ors pho­tos have indis­tinct piles of stuff in them in the background.

After what feels like a mil­lion years of hav­ing the many stages of quilt evol­u­tion lying around my liv­ing room, the quilt is finally done! As of this morn­ing it is bound, washed, and wait­ing to be used. It is wonky, it is ran­dom, and — if I may say so myself — it’s wonderful.

Dis­turb­ingly, given how much I was dread­ing it, I think my favour­ite part of the whole thing was hand­sew­ing the bind­ing. I star­ted last night, and fin­ished this morn­ing — a good few hours of work, but slightly addict­ive as you watch the quilt really form in front of you. Because we go away later today, my obsess­ive part kicked in once I’d star­ted and wanted it all fin­ished before I left and, cour­tesy of a lousy night’s sleep, it was.

What’s that? You want a wonky, badly framed bird’s eye view of the whole quilt top? Well, that’s lucky…

You can see in this photo the corner of the quilt not bound in yel­low, but by scraps of the top — there wasn’t quite enough yel­low to go round, and I was loathe to go out and buy more fab­ric, so impro­vised with what I had left. I actu­ally quite like it; it’s make­shift and unplanned, much like the rest of the quilt.

The toughest part for me was man­hand­ling the whole thing through the sew­ing machine dur­ing the quilt­ing pro­cess — it was sur­pris­ingly phys­ical work for me, though I’m a feeble weak­ling at the best of times. I was pretty anxious about mak­ing the bind­ing — after a failed attempt, I finally sat on Tues­day night and meas­ured out. Just hav­ing Al in the room while I did so helped me to keep it all in per­spect­ive -  I really hope all nervous quilters have help­ful live-in engin­eers to calm them down and show them how best to use a ruler.

For now though, I’m just excited with the fin­ished product and immod­estly impressed with myself for actu­ally fin­ish­ing a pro­ject! I have very much been taken with the quilt­ing bug, and want to get star­ted on my next pro­ject as soon as we’re home. Luck­ily, someone has been spend­ing all of her money on quilt­ing fab­rics for the last while, so there’s no end of options for Quilt II!

Embroidery bird

In Uncategorized on 3 June 2010 with no comments

Embroid­ery, it turns out, is a bit addict­ive. Some­thing both fun and cre­at­ive you can do whilst watch­ing the tele­visual cel­eb­ra­tion of bonker­ness, Euro­vi­sion? Yes please.

The idea of work­ing from a pat­tern seems a bit dull to me, not to men­tion ever-so-slightly scary, so I’m impro­vising with free­form, seat-of-your-pants stitch­ing. This bird is a reg­u­lar doodle of mine, roughly drawn onto some cot­ton with a fab­ric pen­cil and then even more roughly drawn in with thread and fab­ric scraps from EL Quilto (which is slowly get­ting there..!)

Once bird was done, I moved onto my next plan, which was a rain­cloud. Roughly inspired by a col­lo­graph I made at Edin­burgh Print­makers, this was going to be a happy rain­cloud, but I guess he (or I) just got a bit over­tired dur­ing the stitching.

For some reason, I only seem able to embroider at week­ends, but i’m hop­ing that might start to change as I draw some stronger divid­ing lines between work and play. I’ve grabbed a place at Edin­burgh Screen­works for June and July, with a view to extend­ing into forever, depend­ing on how it works out. It’s still an excit­ing nov­elty to set out for work in the, well, after­noon — we’ll see how long that lasts!