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.

29Nov2013

No turkey here…just some Urban Chickens

Posted in Finished Quilts, Quilt patterns, Scrap quilts by wombatquilts

After a day full of Thanksgiving turkey yesterday, I thought I would stick with the poultry theme, but shake it up a little. Somewhere in between baking tons and tons of pies this week I managed to finish my Urban Chicken Quilt.

This block is so fun and so easy to make… I set it as one of my Do.good.Stitches Bee blocks so you will be seeing another version on this site in the next month or so. My tutorial for making this block can be found here.

I really do love how easy this quilt block is. I think it will be my new “go to” block when I need to get a kids quilt done quickly. Though next time I think I will put some more prints into the quilt, not just tone on tones. I also want to try to make one just using solids. Oh I have too many ideas and not enough time.

For the quilting on this, I just went with straight lines, running either side of the ditch. At some point, as my FMQ gets better I would like to quilt one of these with “chickens”, that is triangles, all over it.

To back this quilt I used the last of my IKEA green and blue fabric. This fabric has been a great way to back my quilts and I am going to keep my eye out for more of it. The backing is one solid piece, but it looks like I have sewn together a pile of solid fat quarters.

The finishing touch is an electric blue binding… I seem to go through a lot of binding in electric blue for some reason. It is either that or someone/something is eating my blue binding.

So there she is…my first finished Urban Chicken quilt. I am now off to make myself a turkey sandwich… got to love Thanksgiving day leftovers.

22Nov2013

Tricky Triangles finally finished

Posted in Finished Quilts, Scrap quilts by wombatquilts

I am very very very pleased to say that my pink and green triangle quilt is finally all done. I have procrastinated with this quilt in new and exciting ways over the last 6+ months… but she is now completed and I can move on with the rest of my life.

I must admit, in the spirit of full disclosure, that I had planned for this quilt to be bigger than what she ended up as, but I got to the point where I had had enough and just went with the blocks I had made. Her finished dimensions are 45 inches x 50 inches which is a smallish kids quilt.

I first posted this block way back in April… I had been given a small scrap pile of olive green fabric and wanted to do something with it. Hot pink fabric was chosen to go with the olive and a triangle paper pieced pattern from the “Modern Blocks” book was chosen. I was so optimistic with that first post I titled it “Triangle Love”.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago, when I decided to bite the bullet and finish this sucker… but now I was referring to it as “Triangle Trauma“. Oh what a difference time makes….

Now all is said and done I am really happy with how this quilt turned out…but will not be jumping into another triangle quilt for a while! For the backing of the quilt I used a piece of Densye Schmidt which worked perfectly with the quilt top.

For the quilting I selected a random triangle, quilted around it and then radiated the quilting out from there. It is straight line quilting but with a twist. I went with pink thread of course, because you can never get enough pink in my opinion!

I nearly went with pink binding but opted for a Kona olive green instead – I think it made the pink pop a little more.

So now that I have finished a quilt, I am now, under Ashley’s mum’s rules, allowed to start another one. I have a pattern picked out and fabric pulled… stay tuned.

Quilt Details:

Technique: Modern scrap

Block: Paper pieced triangle pattern from “Modern Blocks”

Finished size: 45″ x 50″

18Nov2013

More Starry Nights – Paper Piecing Monday

Posted in Paper Piecing Monday by wombatquilts

Okay I am getting a little obsessive over these blocks…I am just loving how they are turning out and can not wait to start playing with them on my design wall. This week I add another fun one to the collection.

This is another pattern from Quilting on the Squares free Bonus Star collection. The pattern is called Diamond in the Rough and comes in at a measly 48 pieces.

I am hoping with next weeks block to have enough stars done to start playing with layout.

8Nov2013

Urban Chicken Fun

Posted in Quilt patterns, Scrap quilts by wombatquilts

This week I manged to finish my first Urban Chicken quilt top…. I am so excited. I love this modern easy fun pattern.

The Urban Chicken block was designed for the Portland Modern Quilt Guild meetup by Michelle Freedman. You can find my original post and tutorial on making the block here.

When laying the quilt top out I had great fun making the chickens run all around… there really is a sense of silly to this quilt block that I love.

It is also a very forgiving block – wonky triangles, lots of scraps and bold bright colours. You can get away with a few squiffy seams if need be.

This is Urban Chicken number 1 for me. I have another one following close behind in warmer colours, as I set this pattern for my Do.good.stitches bee this month. You have been warned!