A pretty little finish…

This week I finally finished up my hexagon flower baby quilt. This quilt came about after a small mistake with my hexi pelt… but it is definitely lemonade and not lemons…

hexagon baby quilt

For this quilt I took the hexagon flowers I had hand pieced and attached them to a low volume back ground… if you want to know more about my process for this you can check out my original post…

When it came time to put this quilt together I decided to use a high loft wool batting… which gives the quilt a plush softness that I think is great for a baby quilt.

hexi quilt detail

I did not want to over quilt so I echo stiched the block lines, leaving a puff flower center. Because the flowers were stitched onto the blocks before the quilt was quilted the flower has a raised feel to it.

hexi flower detail

Plus there is enough fussy cut goodness in it to make for a good game or two of eye spy….

hexis

Since I made my hexie mistake I have been avoiding my hexie pelt. I have over 100+ flowers made but I have not been brave enough to attach them to my pelt. I am hoping finishing this project up will get me over my hexagon hump… but the pelt at the moment looks like this…

hexagon quilt wip 2

24Aug2015

A growing EPP obsession…

Posted in Paper Piecing Monday by wombatquilts

Over the last couple of weeks I have been gallivanting to a wedding in Southern California, traipsing around Disneyland and teaching a bunch of wonderful 8 to 10 years old sew doll clothes. It has been fun and action packed, but there has been only a sprinkling of quilting… and all of it has been English paper piecing.

My go to travel project has become my new obsession… For the California trip I packed my mini Liberty dresden kit…

… I managed to get quite a few dresdens blades done while sitting on the plane or by the pool…

… I have become a little obsessed with finding little scraps of Liberty to add to this project…

… and I really do mean mini scraps. I can get two blades easily from a 2 1/2 inch square!

My other ongoing summer travel project, my hexagon pelt, has gone with me to games nights, picnics and camping….

I grab this kit regularly when we are heading ona long drive or out to events… just in case I get time to baste a few hexies….

I also have just started basting some mini Cotton and Steel hexies. I had so many little scraps of fabric left over after making a couple of Cotton and Steel mini quilts for the swap (check out the post here to see two of them) that could not got to waste so…

The C+S hexagons were made from scraps that were too small for my main hexagon pelt (main pelt hexie size is 1 inch)…

Now three EPP projects on the go at the same time might seem excessive, but I am sure I can handle a couple more…. you see, last week for my birthday I got these books…

..and the July copy of Love Patchwork and Quilting which had this free gift with it…

…plus I also discovered that you can use the EQ7 quilting program to print out quilt blocks in segments….. I think my obsession with hand work may have only just started…

3Aug2015

Making paper piecing Lemonade…

Posted in Paper Piecing Monday by wombatquilts

So a couple of weeks ago I realised I had made a hideous paper piecing miscalculation…. it all started in December last year when I had lots of time sitting around hospitals with my darling husband. I wanted to bring hand work but my hexie pelt…

..had become unruly and unmanageable. I had taken the cardboard papers out of the center to help make it easier to handle but it was too big for me to keep adding hexies easily. The solution was of course to start a second pelt that I could just sew to the first pelt when it got big enough. Great solution right?….

In theory yes… in practice I stuffed it up big time. Fast forward five months and I go to attach the second pelt only to discover my second pelt would not fit my first pelt. The two pieces would not align no matter what way I put them. My huge miscalculation resulted in a tantrum, lots of tears and copious amounts of swearing.

My darling husband, who has claimed the hexagon pelt as his quilt, tried to comfort me…but somehow failed to grasp the complete heart ache of spending months hand sewing something together only to realise you are going to have to unpick it all. The worst bit was that I had removed all but a few of the papers which made the flowers almost impossible to reattach to the main pelt… it is very tricky to get neat, even stitches without the cardboard supporting the hexagon.

So I put everything aside, not sure when I would be ready to face the horrible task ahead of me, and uncertain about what to do with the hexagons that could not be re-attached. Then Sunday it dawned on me what I needed to do….

The idea came from a special quilt that was made for Rachel of Stitched in Color…. I had made hexagons for this quilt and watched it slowly come together. This was the solution to my problem.

And so I have started gluing….

and sewing my hexagons onto a 6 1/2 inch square low volume background…

and I am loving the effect.

I will have enough flowers from my second pelt mishap to make a baby quilt. I can not tell you how excited I am to find such a pretty solution to my issues. I have definitely made lemonade out of those lemons!

22May2015

Fully embracing Mini Quilts

Posted in Finished Quilts by wombatquilts

If you are not on Instagram you probably are not aware of the flurry of mini quilt swaps that have been happening over the last year or so. Hundreds and hundreds of mini quilts have been made a swapped all over the world and people’s homes now have walls adorned in beautiful little quilts. After resisting for nearly a year, in February I finally signed up for my first mini quilt swap – the Cotton and Steel mini quilt swap.

I shared my first quilt for this swap a couple of months ago, including the paper piecing pattern I used for this quilt on my original post…….

I liked it but I was not exactly what I wanted. So I went back to the drawing board and came up with this beauty…

I loved making this 15 inch square sampler and shrinking all these quilt blocks down to 3 inches was fun. Nearly all these blocks were paper pieced as I find it is the easiest way for me to get accuracy at this small size.

I really loved putting this quilt together…and even found some prints I could fussy cut at this small size!

So with my Cotton and Steel mini done I felt the need to sign up for another mini swap… this time the Lizzy House mini quilt swap. Now Lizzy House is my favorite designer… I love her prints. As so many of my quilts end up going to kids charities Lizzy Houses fun, modern novelty prints were an instant hit with me.

So what do you do when you have a huge collection of fabulous Lizzy House prints… you make hexagons of course…

So this is my Lizzy House mini work in progress. The day I signed up for the swap I started making hexagons and once I had them all I had a blast arranging and re-arranging them until I had a layout I was happy with.

This quilt has been so much fun to make…though a little tough on my hands as there has been a lot of hand sewing…

I started making this mini before I had my partner details (yes I was that excited!). After you sign up you get assigned a partner, you get sent a list of likes and dislikes and you can stalk them on Instagram so you can make something appropriate for them. So as much as I love these hexagons, I was not sure it was totally up my partners alley… so I made another mini…

..which is much more her style. This quilt is uses four different New York beauty patterns… and I love the unity of the similar shapes of the New York Beauty block combined with the disconnect of the different patterns pieces.

I am sure my partner will love which ever mini I end up sending. I have a couple more weeks before the quilts have to be sent and there is a chance I will change my mind again and make something else. This is the joy of mini quilts…they are so quick and easy to make.

So I can now say I am a mini quilt addict, though I have controlled myself this month and not signed up for any more swaps…yet.

24Feb2014

Paper Piecing Monday EPP Style

Posted in Paper Piecing Monday by wombatquilts

It is hexagon central here at Wombat Quilts. I have just started another hexagon quilt, this time a miniature quilt, as part of the Michael Miller “Glitz” Challenge our Modern Guild is doing. We were given 8 fat eighths of the fabulously Art Deco looking “Glitz” fabric line…

and I just had to make those dots into hexagons…

I have also been slowing plugging away on my bright daisy hexagon quilt which has been a wip for over a year now…

But the newest hexagon addition to the family is an amazing vintage hexagon top I picked up at a local thrift store for $10.

It was a revelation for me to see the hand workings on this top. It is stitched in most places using a simple running stitch to keep the hexagons in place…

and in a couple of places there is little more stitching, mainly where the seams are a little smaller…

This quilt top was found shoved in a basket with other fabrics… it has not been treated too well, I would say, recently but it has held up beautifully. There is only one place where I will have to do a little repair. On the other hand I have been stitching the bejebus out of my hexagons…

Lots and lots and lots of little stitches because I was scared it would not hold together. Having seen the work on my beautiful vintage hexagon, I am thinking of taking my stitch count down a little.

If you are interested in learning more about English paper piecing or want some hexagon templates check out my post from last year which has tips and links galore..

To finish off I thought I would share some photos of the amazing fabrics on my “new” vintage quilt top. Here are some my favorites…