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