A Feathered Starry Night

Posted in Paper Piecing Monday by wombatquilts

This week I am quickly jumping back into my Starry Night quilt, mainly because I think I am close to having all the blocks I want/need…plus I am slightly addicted to the blue-yellow contrast. The result of the weekends playing was this star…

We were snowed in this weekend which allowed me to play a little. I designed this pattern, a copy of which you can find here Starry Night Feathered but instead of printing it out as I usually do, I thought I would give tracing paper a go. So I traced my pattern on the paper, using a good old-fashioned pencil and ruler. This is definitely the down side to tracing paper. I had previously tried to get my inkjet printer to take the extra thin tracing paper but it was not having any of it.

So the advantages of tracing paper are…

(1) it is thin enough that lining up your fabric is easy

(2) the thinness of the paper also means that you get less bulk where seams meet and

(3) my stitches had less give when the paper is remove and the paper was easier to remove.

The downside…

(1) if you can not get it to print on your printer, tracing the pattern is a laborious task

(2) I missed the extra sturdiness that photocopy paper gives your pattern, particularly when sewing the pattern pieces together. My pattern kept flopping over and moving.

(3) it is more expensive per sheet and not as easy to find as photocopy paper.

Okay the experiment is over and so is the snow. I am going to stick with photocopy paper… and go back to using my sheets of cardboard as a background to my blocks instead of wonderful snow.

5Feb2014

Colour Play – Brown

Posted in Scrap quilts, WIP Wednesday by wombatquilts

Last weekend, while my husband was away on a “dude’s weekend” I took the opportunity to clean up my stash a little. Needless to say there was fabric from one end of the house to the other… it looked like a fabulous colourful fabric bomb had gone off. During this process I realized I had somehow accumulated a decent size stash of brown fabric. I am still not sure how this happened as brown is definitely not a colour I use at all, ever, but now I had found it I of course had to use it.

I love a good challenge and finding good uses for brown fabric is a perfect challenge for 2014. Fired up it took me less than 5 minutes to find some inspiration in my house, and the game was on.

This inspiration, a glass vase….

became this fabric pull…

The pattern I chose was a fabulously simple free paper piecing number from Quilters Cache… the Fly Foot 2 .

Which when you do alternating colour blocks turns out like this…

These blocks when added to other blocks make this amazing plaid like pattern…

For the first time in my quilting life I have used brown as a predominate colour and I love the results. There will be more brown combinations in my future… so stay tuned.

3Feb2014

We have neon…we have pink…

Posted in Paper Piecing Monday by wombatquilts

What more could you want?

This paper piecing Monday sees me full embracing the Neon crazy. In my defense I did not start this but I am definitely going to finish it. This week I worked out exactly what direction I wanted to take with this quilt and so designed this block with my new “cunning plan” in mind.

You see this quilt was inspired by two “orphan” blocks that I inherited when I took over my role at Portland Modern Quilt Guild. I hate to see fabulous blocks go to waste, and love the challenge of finding a way to use them. I warn you I inherited a lot of weird and wonderful things and you will see more of them over the next 12 months.

The two blocks I started with were 11 inch neon pink and grey. I do not know who made them, but they are fabulous. My plan is to border the grey blocks with 1 inch of white sashing and make a checker board style quilt with alternating 11 inch grey blocks and white border blocks.

So for this week’s block I designed a snowball style block, with a larger than usual white border. I am loving this block and can not wait to make it in my traditional scrappy style. The block is a fun 40 pieces and was really simple to whip up. The 12 inch pattern can be found here…WQ Neon Block 2.

I also wanted to thank everyone for their kind comments about my “magazine debut”. I quilt because I love (in a crazy insane way) but I never thought other people would enjoy what I made as much as they have. I continue to be surprised by the response my quilts get, touched by the comments people leave and grateful for the friendships I am making.

Thank you.

27Jan2014

Another Neon Monday

Posted in Paper Piecing Monday by wombatquilts

This week I was just not able to make myself do another blue block… so to mix things up I thought I would make another Neon block. I recently inherited some Michael Miller Neon scraps and a couple of unused Neon blocks and thought I would try to make a neon quilt for the PMQG charity drive. So here is my first contribution to the quilt…

This is pattern is not too complex but I like how the star seems to have a frame. I did manage this week to get all my points to align and I really learnt from last weeks palava, which means the pattern is ready for use. You can find it here…WQ Neon Star block 1.

I am taking a brief break from my Starry Nights and I am looking forward to doing some non-star paper piecing blocks for this Neon quilt.

13Jan2014

Paper Piecing Monday… better late than never

Posted in Paper Piecing Monday by wombatquilts

Paper Piecing Monday was delayed a little this week by a stonking cold that took me out of action for a few days. I am feeling a little more human today and managed to get this simple little star block made, thru the Dayquil/Lemsip haze…

This block is 6 inches by 6 inches and was again designed in response to my search for smaller star blocks for my Starry Night Quilt. This is a much simpler block than last week, I got a ribbing for calling last week’s block “simple” at 40 pieces. This week’s 20 pieces is definitely simple…right! You can find the pattern here…Starry Night WQ block 2.

I like the 4 triangle piece pattern of this block and may fiddle some more with it to get some different kind of stars. Next week I am going to scale up and aim to get a 10 inch block designed and made… stay tuned.