Nearly there…

After today I am just one block away from having my Neon pink quilt ready to put together… so without further ado here is my penultimate pink neon crazy…

The pattern is a free one that comes with the EQ system, so I need to check copyright and see if I can share it with you. If I can, I will put it one the paper piecing pattern page in the coming week.

I am definitely going to be remaking this block, because it would be AWESOME done scrappy. I have a cunning plan for the block already…

So next week I will post the last neon block for this quilt, but do not despair, as there is more neon in my future. I have one other orphan Neon quilt to put together for the Portland Modern Quilt Guild…. you have been warned.

12Feb2014

Colour Play Turqoise

Posted in Colour Play, Quilt patterns, Scrap quilts by wombatquilts

This week I decided to play with turquoise and my all time favorite neutral, navy blue. There was something about this colour combination and snow that just seemed to work. First I raided my scraps and then pulled this bundle from my stash…

I had used navy and turquoise together before, but with “radiant orchid” and some electric blues thrown into the mix.

This time I wanted to keep it simple, clean, cool. I choose an easy block called “World Without End”. This classic quilt block dates back to the 1900’s and I found some wonderful old examples when searching on-line, including one from the Spencer Museum of Art. For my project I used Quilters Cache’s free paper piecing pattern which you can find here.

This is another quick, fun block that packs a punch, and is perfect for scraps. I just loved how the strong colour contrast with this pattern.

I was surprised how big my turquoise stash was and it has been great fun cutting into it for this project. I have added this to my list of “must finish” for 2014… a list that keeps getting bigger. I need some sewing fairies pronto!

10Feb2014

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.

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.