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

LRT4 Squares ain’t Squares – A lesson in fudging it

I spent Sunday converting my strips of pieces, to a nice rectangle. Sounds easy doesn’t it? Hmmm. My plan with this quilt was to keep the patchwork design simple so that it would be easy to put together and I could make a feature of the quilting. The problem with achieving this first arose when I noticed that the charm squares I had bought (to save me some cutting), were parallelograms, not squares. So, when I strip pieced the squares and rectangles together (refer to my LRT3 post) I lined up all the pieces on the left hand side so I could just trim the right hand edge and would have a nice neat strip. Problem with this was that the pieced strips ended up being wobbly anyway, so I’ve spent a couple of hours figuring out what to do about it.


My first attempt at straightening the pieced strips I tried as planned, only it ended up a banana shape instead of a neat long rectangle and bent the straight leaf strip I joined it too as well (as shown in the photo).

Doh!!

I unpicked the join and started again. Next, I tried just laying the strip out on my cutting board, aligning the left edge of the pieced strip (the straighter one) with one of the grid lines, and just made sure the whole thing was 5 ½ inches all the way along by aligning and cutting about 10” of the length at a time. This meant the whole strip was not square, but each section was only a little bit out. I joined this to a leaf strip, had some lunch, stared at it for a while and decided I could live with that even though it wasn’t as neat as I originally wanted. I finished joining the strips into set of one pieced and one leaf strip, and decided to try and tidy up the ‘squareness’ of it in how I joined each of these sets together.

After a cup of tea and some more thought, I decided that just aligning the top edge of each strip set was not going to work. Visually, it’s more important for the seams joining the blue rectangles with the charm squares to be aligned than whether the top or bottom of the fabric aligned. So I started fudging it again. Back on the cutting board, I aligned one strip set with the gridlines, and marked the leaf fabric to continue the seamline from the pieced strip (stay with me now, it will all make sense soon…). Then I placed the next strip set, with right sides together on top of the leaf strip, and aligned the right hand edges of the fabric, and shifted the top piece up and down, until the seamline on the pieced section of the upper set, aligned with the line I’d marked on the lower set. Finally, I put a few pins across the top to hold the two sets together to get keep the alignment while I sewed the seam.

Finally, by keeping all the pieces flat and aligned with how I’d pinned it, I managed to sew all the strip sets together plus the additional leaf strip (so the leaf pattern is on both outside edges) and ended up with the panel shown in the photo below.

So it was a bit of a fussy and frustrating day, but I think it was worth it. If all the joins had turned out like the first one I did this morning, I would have thrown it away and started again because it would have been impossible to quilt…

Now I have something I can work with and I'll start thinking about what to do with the borders.

BERT

LRT3 - Chain Piecing

I had to laugh this afternoon...as I was chain piecing some sections together I was also thinking about how to explain the process, and promptly made a mistake 3 times in the same strip. Ah well, these things happen. So here's what should happen with chain piecing.

Chain piecing seems to be all about preparation, preparation, preparation. Get that right and all should go well…So how to do the preparation. First of all, carefully cut all the shapes evenly to size. While that works in theory, I discovered that the charm squares that I’d bought weren’t square at all, so when I matched the edge of the rectangles with the edge of one charm square consistently to align each square-rectangle set. This means I have one neat side and one ugly side which I’ll then trim later. As my squares are 5” I found that a dinner plate was a good size for holding the squares, and placing them alternately on the plate made them easier to pick up (ie one as a square, one as a diamond, as shown in the photo).

I put the plate of pieces somewhere handy. For me, that's on the left side of me with the side of the fabric to be sewn closest to the sewing machine . Then to start sewing, just pick up the first set, align it with the edge of a ¼” seam foot on your sewing machine and start sewing. Sewing at a moderate pace, allows you to control the set you are sewing, sew about ¾ along the seam, then pick up the next set and position it while you finish the seam on the first one. Don’t stop sewing at the end of the first set, just keep going, do a few stitches, then feed in the next set. What you’ll end up with is a string of sets joined together that looks like washing on a washing line as shown in the photo. Once you’ve finished the seam on all your sets, just snip the stitches in between each set and..Bob’s your uncle, you’ve got 126 sets all ready to be ironed.

You’ll find you’ll get into a rhythm of sewing and adding a set and finding the next one etc. I was so into the rhythm I ended up with a piecing song, - opposite pieces, straight sides together, sew the seam, next set. It’s a bit like the shopping list in ‘Teddy Bears Go Shopping’ – if you recite it to yourself as you go it makes sure your pieces are correctly matched and the sequence is comfortable and efficient.

For Life’s Rich Tapestry, I’ve done two lots of chain piecing – joining the square-rectangle units, then joining 2 sets of these into unit. As I have sets of six squares/triangles in the strips in my quilt, the strips were pieced the usual way rather than chain piecing so I could complete one strip at a time and avoid ending up with pieces upside down.

Happy Sewing,

Bert