Moving - now at http://bertcollections.wordpress.com/

Greetings!

Just a short note to let you know that I've moved my blog to: http://bertcollections.wordpress.com/.

You'll find all the old posts and a bunch of new ones at the wordpress site.

See you there.

Bert

LizQ4 - Ta da it's finished!

Ok, so I did finish the Liz Quilt around Christmas time so I thought I’d better do an update to share what I learned. As you may recall this was an experimental quilt where I made it up as I went along. My theme song became “what the heck, give it a try, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work”. It was surprising how liberating this was – my usual procrastination over colours and shapes and quilting disappeared and I just got it done.

I think my favourite part of this quilt is the border/bindinh with ric-rac on the outside. I think the idea from this came from a similar set of shapes in my ‘Life’s Rich Tapestry’ quilt where I interrupted a border with a curvey bias strip. For the Liz Q, I was just trying every crazy idea I could think of so continued the theme all the way to the edge of the quilt…What seems to make it effective is the contrast of shapes it brings to the traditional multiple borders finish to the quilt.

Anyway, I’ll put instructions for the cute ric-rac border onto the website so you can replicate it. Great for a fun quilt whether its for a kid or someone like me who’s never grown up :-).



Bert

Lessons - Learning from Deb Louie

Here's a post I'd drafted but hadn't published...


I’d had a hectic couple of months leading up to July last year so I decided to take a couple of days off work and do a quilting course with Deb Louie. I’d be fun, I’d refine my quilting skills and it wouldn’t be too demanding. I turned out to be right on the first that I learned a lot but it was very full on so by the time I finished the course I felt I’d learned a lot but I was buggered :-).

While I’ve done some free-motion quilting in the past and I enjoy it, I’ve used it a lot less than I usually plan because I tend to make large quilts and I have found I end up feeling like I am fighting with my creation rather than making a thing of joy and beauty. I’m hoping this will change now as what I’ve learned from Deb is a simple and systematic way to quilt all over the quilt without having to struggle with it too much. That’s the plan, we’ll see how it works out on my next couple of quilts, but I think I should be pleasantly surprised with the results.

You can find out more about Deb Louie and her quilting classes at http://deblouie.blogspot.com/. While Deb’s style can be a little gruff, she is very knowledgable and experienced, and runs a well planned and organized course.

Cheers,
Bert

QFO 1 - Japanese-y

This weekend’s been great for relaxing and getting some sewing done. I was travelling all week this week and was feeling tired... I was ready for a straight-forward job so I’ve finished my QFO job in time for the Canberra Quilter’s meeting this week.

My QFO job was to do the next step on a quilt. This sort of project is a bit different. The quilt has been pieced by one person, sandwiched and pinned by another and now quilted by me. What’s fun about this is it’s a quilting challenge as the quilt is different to one I’d make, I don’t know what errors were made in putting the pieces together , and I haven’t been thinking about how I might quilt it for months ;-)

I’m happy now as I’ve got the quilting step done this weekend. I’ll now return the quilt for the binding to be added by a fourth Canberra Quilters quilting buddy before the project is passed on to someone in need in the community. I’ve got some quilting practice in and we’ll all feel good. :-)



Cheers,

Bert

PS: Life got extra busy again in the second half of 2010, so I’m just getting back to my sewing and my blog. Lots of projects in the pipeline though…more news next time…

LizQ3 – Fun with Colour

I’m loving making this because I really have little idea what it will be like when it’s finished other than very bright and it’s great to use all of these fun fabrics I’ve been adding to my stash over the last few years and waiting for the right time to use them. This quilt has now become a bit of a challenge to use more and more bright fabrics but in a way that works well. I particularly like the border strip with the sewing notions on it – it pulls all the current elements of the design together really well, and starts to balance out those naughty shoe-fly blocks.

I had a ball last weekend playing with my collection of bright coloured fabrics from my stash. The LizQ has now developed from making a quilt for a sewing room, to being a challenge to use as many bright fabrics in one quilt as I can. How did this happen??

Displacement was discovered by accident, so were post-it notes, and I’m now adding the LizQuilt to the list of happy accidents. I started the quilt with my shoe-fly blocks (see the entry The Liz Quilt – A Random Project (LizQ1)), and when I added them to the panel blocks I created, I thought they overpowered the picture panels which wasn’t the effect I wanted, as the picture below shows.

So I kept adding borders to both balance the shoe-fly blocks and to increase the size of the quilt (it’s still not big enough to be comfy yet – but there’ll be more on what I’ll do about that in the next post or so). And this is where I’ve pieced it to so far.

While the sewing notions strip looks good (I think) it was fiddly to piece because I had to try to match the pattern. I think I’ll write some notes for the website in the next few weeks (http://sites.google.com/site/bertcollections/) to save some of the traumas with this – I spent a long time getting the first join in the pattern done, and then still wasn’t happy with the result. I pinned it to my design wall with the centre panel and thought to myself “why didn’t I just do it this way”. That had a couple of effects – the second join to me about fifteen minutes instead of an hour, and the join was so much neater that I unpicked the first one I’d done differently and re-did the whole thing. In hindsight I probably should have consulted my books and magazines first but I was on a roll and having fun so it didn’t really matter.

The LizQ is now about the standard width of a fabric so the pieces I have not big enough for the next border, so later this week I’m off to my favourite store in Canberra to get some extra bright fabric to help me complete another couple of borders for the quilt top.

So, the LizQ is proving to be lots of fun, and I hope your projects are keeping you amused too.
Bert.

PS: I’m still working on the Time for Tea Quilt (T4T) in the background as well – I’ll post an update on that once I’ve got the ideas clearer and can share them with you.

LizQ2 – Fun with Piecing

I'm having a fun weekend, switching between building outdoor tables from recycled wood in the garage, to piecing the Liz Quilt inside. The LizQ is proving good fun, as for once I don't have strong concept of what I want the finished product to look like, so I'm just adding a section at a time and making it up as I go along. Yesterday that included managing to put two strips on upside down, unpicking the seams, and resewing them, but I was in a good mood, and Mr Mark was sharing the sewing room with me so that made it alright.

Today I've added a thin blue border to the top and bottom of the centre panel, and then I'm adding a thicker patterned border to that. The patterned border needed some tricky joining of the patterns, which I fiddled with on the first section for an hour or more to get it not quite right… then went I to do the second section I thought, oh, why didn't I just do it this way – and had it done in a quarter of the time. Needless to say the iron, stick and sew method I used the second time proved much easier and gave a far superior result, so I'll put the instructions for how to do this on the techniques section of my website so that you and I can both do this the fun and easy way next time around.

Back to do some more quilting and sawing.

Bert

The Liz Quilt (LizQ) – A Random Project

I had a crappy week at work last week, on the weekend I had the flu , and I was feelin’ blue. So instead of writing a country and western song, I decided to brighten up my Saturday with some seriously bright fabrics and put together the initial blocks for a project I’ve been thinking about for a while. So here’s the story…

Mr Mark forced me to buy a ‘Quilter’s Quips’ panel at a quilt shop when we were on holidays last year. The panel has pictures of a quilter with funny quotes about quilters and quilting on it, and its very colourful. So, it’s the perfect starter for a quilt for a quilter, whose sewing room gets quite cold on winter afternoons. I thought about the fabrics I had and the sewing I’d done before, and I remembered that the first piece of patchwork I ever did was making a cushion for my chair at school when I was all of eight or nine years old. Amazingly, I remembered that the design was called ‘shoe-fly’ (yes, it’s probably supposed to be ‘shoo-fly’ but I remember it as shoe so that’s the way I’ve written it) and was essentially a nine patch block with half-square triangles in each corner. I called my Mum to confer about the design, and she confirmed that this matched her memory of the cushion and that it was red and blue. Mum also mentioned some UFOs she had that she and my grandmothers had started when I was small, so I suspect these may now get handed down for me to finish one of these years as well ;-).

Anyway, so I drew up my shoe-fly design, found some bright pink and turquoise fabric that matched the panel and was still close enough to red and blue. I then remembered that my cushion had a print in the corner triangles, I’m not sure what it was though. So, I dug out a white fabric with small brightly coloured buttons on it and put that on the corners, and put strips of it on each panel section so the blocks are all 9” square when they’re finished.

My next challenge is the borders and balancing the strength of colour in the shoe-fly blocks, but that’ll be the next installment.
Have a great week.
Bert

T4T6 – May template is on target, but the design was a bit testing.

I’ve done a lot of rework on the Time for Tea project in the last couple of weeks, and I’ve now got my clock design going. But never fear – I’ve still made my teapot template, so if you need another teapot, you’ll find it on the website at http://sites.google.com/site/bertcollections/templates/teapots.

The redesign has taken me a couple of weeks, some fun drawing and research, and some painstaking work to do. As I mentioned in the previous post, I decided to redesign the centre of the quilt to be a clock face. This means its gone from being a table scene like this…

..to a clock face like this…

I was getting a bit frustrated with the whole design earlier in May, and I seemed to have the best ideas when I got into bed to go to sleep at night. So I’ve now resorted to keeping my sketch book and a pencil beside my bed so I can jot down these ideas when I think of them. I’m not sure it’s the most romantic idea but it seems to work and got me over the quilter’s block. The other thing I did, which scared me a bit, was scanned a sample of each piece of fabric. This helped me refamiliarise myself with the fabrics when I realized I’d forgotten what was in my blue and white collection, and now it means I can also trial different fabrics with the templates on my computer. But, this does seem like something my mum would do, so it did scare me a bit :-)

So, having put in several more hours of work and plenty of random thinking between other things, I’m now more comfortable to proceed with the general design and more templates. Halelujah!

I hope the quilters block stays away for a while now and I (and you) can have some more fun with it.

Happy stitching,
Bert

T4T5 – Gone potty with appliqué – April was a success

Today was fun. Having got myself a new glue stick during the week, I’ve been playing with freezer paper appliqué to further test my Modern Twist appliqué teapot template (try to say that five times quickly!). Here’s what I ended up with...
While I’ve decided I like the result I’ve got, I’m still deciding if this is worth the extra work to use the freezer paper method. I like the rounded edge, the extra layers, the ability to use less stark stitching and the general texture of the freezer paper method. The down side is, it is more fiddly, and I’m not sure it’s worth it yet…So the results we have for the different colours and styles of the Modern Twist teapot are shown in the photo below.

I’ve been thinking some more while I’ve done these three, and I think the design of the quilt is going to change a bit – to now more obviously include a clock face as part of the centre panel, so I think what I might do is use a combination of the different appliqué methods, with the ‘stick and stitch’ method for the appliqué in the background (as its not worth the bother if it will be covered by other layers anyway) and the freezer-paper or similar for the foreground teapots. So what all this means is also that I need some more teapot templates to experiment with to test this view – and probably to explain the general layout of the quilt so you can all picture what it might be like as well.
Happy stitching,
Bert

PS: I drafted this post on 26 April and then neglected to load it - that's why we've got April in the May section - Doh! Bert.

A Mother's Day Diversion - Cards

There’s so much to write about today, I’ve been up to all sorts of things. But first a quick diversion. In preparation for Mother’s Day I decided to experiment with patchwork cards for my collection of mothers. I found some instructions that were a useful starting point at http://craftapple.wordpress.com/2006/08/23/quilted-cards-tutorial/. I made three and they took from about 15minutes to an hour to make depending on how complex I made the design. I varied my approach to craftapples' in that I did use fusible interfacing as the backing for the fabric instead of paper – I like the soft look this has, and it’s easier to work with on my sewing machine. This was a great project and easy to do – I felt very satisfied having played around in the sewing room for a couple of hours, finished more than one thing, and made something that someone else will enjoy. Here’s what the result looked like.


The card size is about 4”x6”, which is within the standard card size limit and so it only cost me 55 cents to post each one as well. I was curious to find out from my mothers how these survived the interstate trip with the postman, and I’ve advised that they are in excellent condition. So, I think we can call this a success, and I’ve found another use for the little scrappy bits of fabric that are too small for most things, but too precious to be thrown away.

Happy crafting for another week.
Bert

T4T4 – Testing the Template and my patience ;-)

I’ve been busy making wine today, so with the couple of hours of the day left I decided to do some more experimenting with the Modern Twist teapot template…
Last weekend I took this template and appliqued it using the ‘stick and stitch’ method and two different colour schemes. I was trying to figure out whether the design would be effective as one solid piece, or look better with a bit more contrast. Have a look at the two blocks below and make up your own mind…



I’ve done a survey of the people who’ve visited this week, and the consensus is that the teapot with the contrast is much more effective than the plain one - the plain one loses the great shape of the teapot into one amorphous mass. I also quite like the effect of the contrast block despite the brown which generally isn’t a favourite colour of mine.

Having now decided that the contrast block worked better, I want to also experiment with different appliqué techniques. The stick and stitch examples from last week look fine, but they are still a bit flat, and I’m never entirely satisfied with the durability of this approach given that there are still raw edges ther. Set on experimenting further today, I’ve decided to try the ‘freezer paper’ method as well, to see what results I get.

So, I experimented with different scraps of fabric that I have and my crude-but-effective design wall to figure out what to combine. Next I ironed on and cut out the pieces but…when I went to stick the seam allowance I discovered that…my glue stick had turned into a dried out, rubbery useless thing. Doh! So, the rest of the experiment will have to wait until next weekend when I’ve been shopping and upgraded my glue stick. In the meantime I’ll write some notes for the bertcollections website on using a design wall and wait to see if any of you have comments on the two different versions of the modern twist block as well.

Happy creating for another week.
Bert

T4T3 - The First Teapot Template

Today’s achievement is I’ve made my first teapot template, and started to test it. Since my commitment last week to making one teapot template per month, I’ve done some thinking, and scribbling, reworking and testing and the result is the first template in the teapot collection – which you can now download from the template section of my website at: http://sites.google.com/site/bertcollections/templates/teapots. The first block is called modern twist because it’s inspired by a chrome and black teapot, and I like its largely traditional shape, but with a modern twist of being sleeker and shinier.

I’m going to do a couple of test pieces with this template before I decide the best method to make it with. The first option I’m trying is the ‘stick and stitch’ method using adhesive backing to attach the pieces to the background, and then sewing around the shapes. I think I’ll also try freezer paper to see how the results differ.

I’m also doing two variations of fabric on the first test pieces as well (as shown in the photos below). I want to figure out whether the teapots work better as one continuous piece of fabric or as a combination of fabrics.

From the cutting and pasting I’ve done this afternoon, I think I prefer the combination, but I’ll wait to see what it’s like once its been stitched.

That’s all for now, and happy stitching.

Bert

T4T2 - Applique Designs

Well I’ve just decided to set myself the challenge of designing and making one teapot block per month this year – call it a late new years resolution if you like. This will keep my Time for Tea quilt progressing, and leave me some time for other projects too.

As I’m designing this quilt from scratch, I’m starting with pictures of tea pots like those shown here, and then turning these into appliqué patterns. The idea is that I’ll end up with 12-15 designs as key components for this quilt, and I can work on refining the centre panel design as I go as well (further info on that to follow in an upcoming post). I’m also going to try designing the blocks with my basic computer software to see how I go, and so that I can share these blocks with you as well (and you’ll be able to download the patterns from my website http://sites.google.com/site/bertcollections/). We can see how many potty quilts we can make together, and maybe we’ll have another quilt designed by Christmas.

I’ve included some pictures of tea pots here for inspiration, and if you have pictures of great tea pots, please email them to me at bertcollections@gmail.com – your favourite pot may just become part of the design!

Happy stitching,
Bert

Time 4 Tea (T4T)

I've spent some time over the last few weeks working on the design for a new quilt and it's coming together well. As mentioned in my introductory post (http://bertcollections.blogspot.com/2009/01/introductions.html), I'm working on a quilt inspired by a teapot I've inherited from my paternal grandparents, (although I've decided to change its working title to time for tea). So far what I'm working with is:
*a collection of blue and white print fabrics I collected on a trip to the USA in 2005
*a collection of photographs of teapots that I'm gradually turning into applique patterns on my computer.
I'd like to take the opportunity to thank my friends and family and casual acquaintences for the pictures of teapots that I have so far - each one has a story that goes withit, so maybe I should write a set of short stories to accompany the quilt.

Anyway, what I wanted to write about today is the creative process of getting started on a quilt. Time for Tea, has started with a blend of ideas and has become for me a collage of the story of 'time for a cuppa'. In my family, you're always offered a cup of tea when you visit someone, it's an easy way of asking "what's happening", a form of comfort from life's troubles (especially if someone else makes it), and a way of just getting "five minutes peace" from the bustle of daily life. I have many happy memories of sitting at the dining table with members of my family just spending good times together . I should also mention that tea is particularly part of 'the girls'' traditions in the family, and reminds me of my grand mothers so I'm making the quilt particularly with them in mind, but almost as a tribute to the women of my family. What I'm trying to do in the quilt is somehow combine all these ideas.

In addition to the ideas I want to convey, the broad style of the quilt (traditional, modern, square, rectangular, big, small etc.) is an important thing for me to clarify early, and then I develop some 'rules of thumb' that I use when deciding what to do next for the quilt to make sure the overall tone or theme of the quilt is consistent. In this case, I'm working with traditional style fabrics, on a symettrical design based on a clock in the centre with borders and features round the the outside (I'll post a picture of my scribbles to show what I mean). I want the fabrics and symmetry of the quilt to make it look traditional, but to use the applique and quilting to make the quilt more informal, to reflect homely origins of the ideas.

That's about where the ideas for T4T are at. For now I need to create some more applique patterns from photos I collected while on holidays and refne the design a bit further - oh, and finish the Life's Rich Tapestry quilt which I was going to start quilting 10 minutes ago, but decided I type a blog entry while I had my cup of tea first, so the tradition continues :-)

Happy holidays to one and all on Christmas day,
Bert

LRT7 – Structural/Stabilising Quilting and Wine?

This weekend I’ve done some structural or stabilizing quilting on Life’s Rich Tapestry. What’s amused me is the amount of concentration it takes to do long lines of ‘stitching in the ditch’. Most of the ‘ditch stitching’ that I’ve done before has been lots of short lines, so the fact that every time I day dreamed I caught the wrong piece of fabric was interesting. What’s more, I had a glass or two of wine at lunch time today, which seemed to make the first couple of rows easier, and the last couple harder (sleepiness setting in :-). On the whole, I’m quite pleased with the results anyway.

I’m trying to keep the pieces square with this stabilizing quilting, by starting with two horizontal lines on either side of the leaf border at the top of the quilt, then doing the vertical lines in the centre, which I’ll follow with stitching along the horizontal leaf border at the bottom (refer to the photo of the whole quilt below). While this appraoch has kept the squares and vertical lines of the centre section nice and straight, the horizontal border at the bottom seems to have stretched or moved, as had the outer border in the top right hand corner. The lead to the fabric puckering and the edge I was going to ditch stitch on the leaf border looking more like a scalloped one than a straight one (as shown in the photo above). So… I’ve repinned the bottom border and top right corner this afternoon and, as the photo to the leftshows, this seems to have smoothed out the issue enough and straightened the lines again.

Despite the slipping of the lower border of the quilt, last weekend’s approach to pins (refer LRT6 post) seemed to work – I had enough pins to keep the work stable, without getting in the way too much. I’m happy that the final result is both nice and even and straight. So any errors were from my trying to think about something else while I was quilting, not the pins :-D . And...here's the result.
Happy crafting until next time,
Bert

LRT 6 – Quilt Sandwich and Basting.

While the title here may suggest I’ve spent the day baking, this couldn’t be further from the truth. I’ve spent today pin-basting the quilt sandwich (backing, batting and quilt-top) of my ‘Life’s Rich Tapestry’ creation. This is a slow, careful process that gave me some time for reflection and appreciation for the art of quilting. I’ll cover the sandwiching process in the techniques section of my website soon, I thought it would be more constructive to discuss the basting here today, as good information on this seems to be hard to find.

I’ve made nearly 20 quilts now, and while each one has taught me something different, and I’m always keen to experiment and learn something new. From previous projects I knew that sewing basting (by machine or hand) is more difficult than it looks with a large quilt, so the decision is not really whether to pin baste. Pin-basting is absolutely necessary for the end product to reflect the hard work you’ve put into it. Rather, the decision is whether to sew or tack as well as pin. For this project I’m going to try just pins, combined with a two-step process for quilting – structural quilting, then decorative quilting (which I’ll cover in next week’s post). The results of my pin-ing efforts today can be seen in the photo below.

You may notice from the photograph that I’ve flouted the ‘baste every 2inches’ principle and I’ve done this on purpose. In my experience, pin basting can work but only if the pins are in the right place. So I’ve adopted the approach of pin-around-the-quilting-line to see how that works. For the structural quilting, I’m aiming to just follow the vertical and horizontal lines in the piecing, so I’ve pinned through the centre of each piece leaving enough room for the foot of the sewing machine to fit around the pins. The reason I haven’t placed the pins in a 2inch grid is that I find it very frustrating to be constantly stopping to remove pins - it makes my sewing wonky and breaks my concentration. Who knew sewing could be that aggravating ? J

I'd Rather Be Flying (IRBF) - Inspriation

While travelling on holiday last year, I picked up a printed panel of an airport in a shop near Harden NSW. The panel has now inspired a collection of aviation fabrics and notions. I’ve got some initial ideas on how to combine these, but am busy with other projects and deciding on the style I want for this aviation theme quilt “I’d Rather Be Flying”.

You’ll notice in the photos that I have the fabrics pinned to a ‘design wall’. While this sounds fancy, all it is, is some heavy duty cardboard (about 1m x 1.2m) with thin wadding staple-gunned onto it. I’ve added a rod on the back that’s hanging on a couple of picture hooks. It’s a pretty simple, hide-able arrangement. At the moment mine stays on the wall because I have space but it’s previously lived behind desks and only been pulled out when I needed it. I find this a very useful addition to my collection – it’s saved me lots of sewing things together that wouldn’t have ended up looking right. So when you read in a book or magazine or elsewhere on the web about the virtues of a design wall, you’ll know it needn’t be as fancy as it sounds, but that it’s a handy bit of kit to have/make.

I’ll continue musing, but in the meantime you can help me and others who may have purchased these panels by providing us with some inspiration… post a comment or email your ideas on what the quilt could be like or a story you’d like to share. You never know, it might just be the missing link!

BERT

PS: The cockpit instrument panel is a separate printed panel I picked up somewhere else - it just aligns nicely with the runway on the airport panel.

FG2 – Appliqué Do-s and Don’ts

Mum’s been madly sewing flowers onto the background this week so I’ve got a pile of emails from her I thought I’d summarise here for you. Although Mum’s sewing machine has been “chinese water torture” to work with a lot of the week, it looks like she’s prevailed in the end. The photos below show you the progress on the ‘Fantasy Garden’ quilt and I’ve added some dos and don’ts from what we’ve learned/relearned about appliqué in the process.

Do’s
Do a practice piece first – this makes sure problems are identified early and happen (mostly) on the practice piece rather than your best work. This is especially handy for: *getting corners and tight curves right as these can be tricky this allow you to get the idea of how to do these before you do the final ones; *testing threads and decorative stitches; *trying and refining new techniques; and*getting the stitch widths, lengths and combinations right.

If threads are being a problem (catching, not moving through the machine, just not producing nice stitches etc.) try:

• rethreading the machine,
• adjusting the tension,
• different brands or types of threads,
• adding some interfacing or stabilizer (e.g. freezer paper) to reinforce the fabric or make it easier to slide across the machine.

Don’ts
Don't use the cheap fabric for the background – fabric with a low thread count is too thin, pulls through, doesn’t sit flat and generally doesn’t look nice. If you have to use this type of fabric, add some iron-on interfacing (med-heavy weight) to the back of the panel to reinforce it – freezer paper just isn’t sturdy enough for this.

Don't place the sewing lines for the appliqué pieces where seams cross on the background (as occurs in the purple B flowers on this design shown in the photo).

Other Ideas
If working with a large background piece (this one is about 1.2m x 1.5m), try making the background in two (or multiple) sections, applique-ing all the pieces on (except those that cross the centre seam), then add the final seam and remaining appliqués. This should make the movement of the pieces easier “so your not drowning in fabric as you try & navigate the curves”.

That's it from me for today - I've got some experimenting with cutting curves and bias tape to do ;-)

BERT

LRT5 - Trimming and Borders

I find cutting a large pieced section a bit of a nerve racking experience, but I’ve braved it today and it worked, so I thought I’d share with you how to make trimming and borders more successful. As I learned a when I made a large log cabin block a few years ago, the key thing is to trim the panel to be square regularly, because if you leave the trimming to the end, the compound error is large and it’s hard to make it look nice and square. For LRT, I also have the challenge of the squares not really being square (refer to LRT4 post).


To get the panel so it both looks square and is square, I first folded the panel in half vertically and pinned the first and last seams together so the strips would align, and then aligned that fold with the grid on my cutting board, and cut through the layers so the left and right sides of the panel were parallel. I then folded the panel in half again, aligning the top and bottom edges of the earlier fold, as well as the cut edges on the cutting grid, and trimmed the remaining layers so both the corners were square, and the top and bottom edges parallel.


So next was to add the top and bottom strips to create a leafy border all the way around the pieced strips…I’d made the 6 1/2'’ strips of leafy fabric last weekend, so before cutting these to size I had a helper help me measure the vertical height, the horizontal width, and the diagonals of the panel in a few places to confirm it was square, trimmed the top and bottom strips to the same size the selected size of the horizontal strips and sewed them on to the panel. Note, whenever you add a border to a block or panel, measure it as I’ve described above and cut the border strips to the average size of the length or width of the panel. This allows you to fudge it by slightly stretching or condensing the panel to match the strip size. This may sound like a strange thing to do, but this way you make the panel a consistent size and shape rather than adding more layers of errors to sort out when you get to squaring up the completed quilt top.


To do that fudging when adding strips to a square or rectangle, pin both corners of the strip to the panel it’s joined to (as shown in the photo). Do this at both ends of the strip (plus a few pins in between if it’s a long seam) and then loosen or tighten the pieced panel to fit the strip as you sew the seam to make the length match the strip. Presuming both pieces were cut square, this gives you a near-perfect corner when you open the seam out. Then you can just check how square and straight the corners and edges are, trim a little if necessary and carry on with the next section of your quilt. What you end up with might be something like my panel with the border added shown here.

Another fudging tip while I think of it…WARNING!: if you’re a card carrying member of the quilting police then skip on to the next paragraph as this fix may cause you mental harm, otherwise read on…one piece in a joined set that’s very close to the sewing line of seam can be a problem, in a finished quilt it may become exposed with washing, wear and tear etc. Most of my quilts so far has had one of these pesky sections so the best ways I’ve found to deal with it are to: 1) shorten the section so that it’s not an issue, or 2) if the first option will spoil the effect, then sew the seam close to the edge, but then secure that section with a couple more rows of stitching as shown in the photos below. This makes it more difficult for the edges to escape and should stop any fuzziness appearing on the outside of the quilt.

I’ve also done some experimenting for the next border on ‘Life’s Rich Tapestry” this afternoon – I’ll write another post about that shortly ‘cause it was lots of fun.


BERT

Fantasy Garden (FG1) - An experiment

Quilting seems to have been a sociable craft from it’s early days, and although I learned to quilt from friends, I’d never worked on a project with other people before. That’s all over now….Recently, inspired by an article in a magazine, some funky fabric in my stash, the desire to get my Mum back into sewing, and learn more about appliqué, Mum and I embarked on a project together.

The quilt is called ‘Fantasy Garden’ and has a pieced background, with the remainder of the design appliquéd on using the ‘stick it on’ and the freezer paper method. We’ve chosen bright fabrics because that’s what we like and it will brighten up a dark corner in the house.

I’ve told the first chapter of the story in pictures for you (below) and we’ll share the fun with you as we go. From piles of fabric to having the flowers stuck on the background took a support crew, a lot of tea, and about 3 days work. I suspect we’ll get better at this as we go along, but it’s fun to share the creative challenge with someone else.

Have you done a project like this? You could tell us about it with a comment by clicking on the link below. We’d love to hear your stories!

BERT