patchwork

Two new autumn blocks, at last

~ lynsey333 ~ Leave a comment

My autumn quilt mojo is horribly on the wane! I finished the first of these two blocks last October, the second yesterday, and haven’t designed a new one yet. I think I’ve only got 8 more to go so don’t know why enthusiasm is fading, unless it’s the dread prospect of laying them all out to choose the best arrangement and then sewing them all together.

I’ve been doing a lot of knitting, and gardening, and am mostly working from home with the one thing I miss about commuting to my old job being sewing time on the train.

I’m also really struggling with the new (to me) WordPress set-up and can’t find anything. I don’t know if it’s changed or if I accidentally changed settings and now can’t change them back again, but I missed how it used to be, I could just spot what I need and click on it – more or less.

Next with this quilt is to do a count of how many ‘diamond’ and how many ‘star’ blocks I have (i.e. which way the central flying geese are turned), because I need to have an even number of each, and plan my next block accordingly.

In the first block here I was desperate to use a bit more of the hedgehog fabric, even though the background is lighter than I prefer to use now that the project’s more developed, because hedgehogs visit the garden where we live so I want to have a few blocks with them in. In the second block I’ve used a new orangey-brown fabric by Holly Taylor that I think I’ve only used in one other block. The green is one I haven’t used in other blocks though I bought it ages ago. I hadn’t wanted to introduce new fabrics at this stage, but having done the central square and picked the background fabric for the exterior flying geese because it matched so well with the leaves in the bird fabric, somehow that green was the only fabric I had that looked right. The little pinecones went well with the bigger ones in the bird fabric. The whole thing is perhaps a little busy, and the colours maybe a touch Christmassy (though it’s not the only one to slide that way), but I think it’ll be okay.

‘Country charm’ cushion

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I finished the 22 inch square cushion / pillow made from Moda’s ‘Country Charm’ fabric designed by Holly Taylor. I’m pleased with the overall look but unfortunately the mitred corners don’t come to a point at the corners of the cushion, which is a shame. I made borders with mitred corners to front and back and managed to get them to meet, but when sewing front and back together somehow didn’t have the corners of the cushions precise enough. It’s difficult because they’re back-to-back and of course the front is quilted so you can’t see the front fabric, but to be honest I hadn’t really thought about it until I turned it the right way out and saw the problem. If I’d given it more thought I guess I could have put pins through the points to try and get them to line up, and while it may not have been perfect it would have been better. I’d already reinforced the opening at the back where the pillow or cushion pad goes in with an extra line of stitching and really couldn’t face unpicking it, so it’s staying like that. I’d already trimmed the fabric and wadding at the corners and think unpicking and resewing it would have done more harm than good anyway. Oh well, it’s not like it’s an exhibition piece! I really like the colours of this fabric range. I wouldn’t usually use some of the brighter colours, nor the filler that’s got sort of geometric lines on it, but as they were part of the pack included a few and they do help balance it all out.

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Pillow front

 

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Pillow front

Cushion back
Pillow back

I need to get on with the autumn quilt that’s composed of flying geese and squares, and have almost finished a block I started back in December, but with I think 53 blocks finished and about 10 to go I’ve run out of enthusiasm. It’s trying to come up with fabric  combinations that’s getting to me, so much mental energy and time required! I do know that’s pathetic, and the longer I leave it the less keen I am on some of the blocks I’ve already done, so must give myself a prod.

Having said that, today’s warmer so I’m off to the garden to plant some plants – go to take the opportunity to be outside when it presents itself!

 

Quilted pillowcase front

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I finished quilting the front of the big square pillowcase on Sunday (not Saturday as I’d intended!) and am pleased with the result. I’ve wanted to try quilting lines parallel to the seams of the square patches for a while, but the first time I tried it was a disaster, so my skills with the sewing machine must have improved – that, and getting a quilting foot. I can’t do a few backward stitches to anchor it like you’re supposed to because I find it hard to see exactly where the needle is and I don’t want to overshoot the edges, so I sew them all in by hand which is time-consuming.

I was inspired by (i.e. copied) the quilting on a quilt I bought from a catalogue years ago, before I started doing patchwork, but for various reasons only brought out of its packet this year after we moved house. It’s lovely shades of green and yellow with a little bit of white and blue floral mixed in, and has squares in the middle then strips round the outside. That quilting pattern is the squares-within-the-squares thing then parallel lines around the edges where the strips are, so I put two parallel lines round my mitred borders. I decided they’d be too close together if I made them equidistant, but that one line only would look daft, so the space between the squares and the first line is 6/8 inch like the lines within the squares, then the outermost line is 1/2 inch from that.

The second photo is of the back of the quilting because you can see the pattern more clearly. You can also see where I’ve got threads that still need to be sewn in!

Sorry if the blue background looks odd, I took it outside to photograph because the light’s better and needed something to keep the item off the ground, and this is all I had to hand. Taking it outside has actually made it look over-exposed; the colours are darker / brighter in real life, more like in my previous post. But I’m no photographer!

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Next step is to finish sewing the ends in then to sew the front to the two back pieces. Before I do that I also need to hem the edges of the back pieces where they overlap for the pillow to be inserted.

Autumn Block 53 (and allotment)

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Finished this a while ago, but I’m a bit all-over-the-place craftwise. I think I’ve now 11 left to make. I’ve now used up the last of the olive green rosehip fabric which I’m pleased with as it would be a shame to waste it. Getting the other pieces to match was a bit of a struggle but the fussy-cut pumpkins came to the rescue again. I slightly dread to think how many blocks I’ve used that fabric in; maybe it’s not as many as I think…

I’ve finished the LeMoyne Star placemat and sent it down to my parents on Saturday, so it won’t have arrived yet. I’ll wait to post about it until Mum’s received it! I may alternate and do one autumn block, one placemat, that will keep my interest piqued (I hope). However, I’m doing a lot of knitting and finding time at the weekend to design a new autumn block is proving to be tricky because I’m spending a lot of time in the allotment. So many weeds, so little time! We’ve visitors coming for tea on Sunday p.m. so I’ll no doubt be doing mad tidying and cleaning beforehand. This is how my mind workds – in preparation for that I have finished the front of one of the two jumpers I’m knitting, so I can put it away and it’s one less thing cluttering up the table in our living room! I really don’t like the jumper but have now ‘only’ the sleeves to do, so I’ll go back to them later, probably next year. I want to finish my multi-coloured jumper first, then start on a cardigan I’m knitting Dad for Christmas.

It’s exciting to see the allotment produce starting to come through, after a colder and wetter June than normal. Last year was baking hot which I hated more, and I suppose you can’t win either way. I’m happy my third attempt at nurturing a pumpkin seedling to teenager-hood has worked – so far, I don’t want to curse it! I’ve had a bad year for pumpkin and squash seedlings, they’ve gone leggy, got whitefly, snapped…. I think I’ve lost at least 4 that had got as far as being planted in the soil outside. I’ve one ‘winter squash’ that needs to get bigger and stronger before it can go in the soil, but otherwise I think that what’s planted is all there is to go in the ground, just have to keep feeding and watering! Planted lots more flowers this year and am enjoying those, even if some of them (roses mainly) went ‘splat’ in all the rain we had. One nasturtium I grew from seed and nearly lost is now rampant (the orange flowered plant in the photo) and has almost swallowed the beans.

Baby gem squash
Courgette, bean, nasturtium, potatoes
pumpkin

LeMoyne star early stages

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I’m having a bash at a LeMoyne star for a placemat. My parents have had new windows put in and the new windowsills scratch easily so Mum suggested I make some mats for them, which pleases me greatly as it’s nice to have an excuse to try something new and to use up some of my stash. Trying out new things on a small project is ideal. So I browsed through Linda Clements’ ‘Quilter’s Bible’ and settled on the LeMoyne pattern. I really want to try something with shapes other than half-square triangles and flying geese, but am a bit daunted by templates. I did use templates for the farmer’s wife cushion 9-block cushion cover I made a couple of Christmasses ago and it was easily the hardest thing I’ve done in quilting terms!

This was me yesterday, trying out a few different combinations (not including the corner pieces. I decided on the one without pink, though I may use it for the binding. I will use the other pieces I cut for another place mat, to be decided.

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I cut out the pieces using a rotary cutter and a multi-size perspex diamond template, though I think I made a mistake cutting out the green ones because I thought straight grain could be either horizontal or vertical, but the first strip I cut (the plain green) was really stretchy which made it hard to cut around the template accurately; I cut the patterned fabrics on the grain that runs parallel to the selvedge and that was much easier. I don’t have a right-angled triangle template so cut squares then cut them in half diagonally.

I’m sewing the units of 2xdiamond + 1 triangle using the inset seam method as explained in the Quilter’s Bible, though I’m confused by it also saying to offset the seams as I don’t see how when the point has to go where the point where the two diamonds meet, but I’ve gone ahead and hope it makes sense later.

So far I’ve sewn together the long edges of two sets of diamonds (it was three but one wasn’t accurate enough and then I saw I’d sewn it with the wrong edges together for the pattern anyway) and have attached the triangle to one. This is it when I had the last seam of the triangle left to sew on.

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When I finished the unit I found I’d made the half-square triangles too big, they line up with the edges on the diamond before they’re sewn together, but not afterwards! Glad I only made one set.

This is the finished unit, front and back. It’s bulky where the points meet and you can see some stitches at the point, but it seems okay… have to wait until I’ve done some more to be sure.

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Blocks 51 and 52

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In my stroll to the finish line of 64 blocks I’m evening up the number of ‘stars’ as opposed to ‘diamonds’, as the pattern of the finished quilt alternates blocks with the centre 4 flying geese reversed. The first of these ‘star’ blocks I finished in February and enjoyed putting together, even though in the scheme of the quilt in may be more green than most, I love the colour combination. I made a similar one earlier but with the diamond centre and a bit of brown, so I wanted to make another with the flying geese reversed. I did want to include brown in this but just couldn’t make it work. If this isn’t the only block in the quilt that consists of only 4 fabrics, it’s certainly one of very few. Lots of nice Moda fabrics again, including Prairie Cactus, one of my favourites.

Green

This next block, on the contrary, is not one of my favourites. It’s the subject of my last blog post reworked so that the centre square is a lighter shade of brown, repeated on the outer four corners, and with the dark brown triangles on the outer edge replaced on two sides with all that is left of one of my favourite fabrics for this project (salvaged from an unsuccessful block I took apart). The trouble is that I could not get the centre four squares right, no fabric I tried looked right, so in the end this was the best I could muster. I’ve nearly run out of this fabric so couldn’t afford to do too much fussy cutting, hence the purple remains and I don’t like it. I don’t like the overall effect in that when it’s gloomy and you stand back from the block, the centre four squares blend into the dark orange of the star so it looks like a big dark lump in the middle. I think it would have been better with a smaller print but there was only one in my stash that sort of worked, but alas not well enough. So this is the best I can do. Orange and brown

I think I’m going to have to have a recount of how many blocks I still have to do! Thought it was 10 but if these really are blocks 51 and 52 then it’s 12…

Bad idea

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I started making this. It is revolting! I don’t know what I was thinking. As I near the end I wanted to use this pumpkin fabric, because I’ve made one block with a little bit of it in and thought I should make at least one more with it in so that block wasn’t alone. I thought all of this was okay except the four little squares in the centre block-within-a-block and eventually decided these were the best I can do. But yuck! In the light of day, this has to come apart. Maybe I can swap another fabric for these centre four and it will be okay, but I’m not convinced. I’ve known this in my heart of hearts for days but just haven’t acted on it. At least I know what I’ll be doing on the commute home tonight (provided I have a seat). What I don’t think I’ll be doing is taking apart any more flying geese, the cream and the dark orange are being re-used as it is and are a bit frayed. But I do wonder if the dark brown is too dark here, and if I still think that when I’ve tried replacing the four little squares I may have to change the centre and outer squares too.

Yuck

Baby quilt

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The baby quilt has been safely received in Australia. Not that the baby needs it in the hot weather they’ve been having, though they’re near Melbourne where it gets chilly in the winter so they may have a use for it in a few months’ time.

Baby quilt

Baby quilt hanging

Shan’t lie, I enjoyed using pre-cut squares! Apart from a few a cut from the cloud fabric I used for the back.

Doing a wavy design was fun, I can’t do freemotion quilting so it was nice to find a way of quilting that didn’t involve straight lines. I had a bit of a to-do working out how to do it, til I thought of using thin craft masking tape. They don’t line up, but I don’t think it matters.

Baby quilt back

I had my usual issue with finishing the binding. I almost had it right and in fact thought I’d finished, though not exactly as in the book I had it close enough that it would pass. Then I found I was so tired and the light so poor I’d managed to put the entire binding on inside out… then I couldn’t go to bed til I’d unpicked it so that was a late night. The result was that because I’d already trimmed where the binding met and it was at the wrong angle when you put on the fabric the right way round, I just had to sew over the top of it, complete with frayed edges (thought about blanket stitch but it seemed to make it worse and I’m bad at blanket stitch).

Baby quilt binding problem

So it remains the case that I have yet to finish a quilt with the binding done properly, grrr. Perhaps by the time I actually finish the autumn quilt that is my original ‘first patchwork quilt’ I’ll have worked it out!

We’ve had a weird extra-warm spell for mid-February so I spent a lot of time in the allotment this weekend, which was great (if back-breaking). Wish I could be there now!

North American wildlife block

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I didn’t really set out to make a specifically North American block, but searching for ‘woodland’ fabric on Ebay in an attempt to find more of a fabric I’ve used before but run out of, I came across material with moose, bears, and deer. It had autumn coloured leaves and some pine cones, so autumnal enough to fit my theme and I couldn’t resist! It wasn’t actually that easy to make it blend in with others, perhaps because the background is very white and I’ve been steering away from that to more tan coloured backgrounds, or because there’s something about the way the animals are drawn, can’t quite put my finger on it.

Moose

The centre came together easily but not the outer edge, and I’m not actually sure they go together. I like the fir tree patterned fabric but have only used it in one other, recent, block and won’t use much more of it (if any) in the remaining blocks because the green is quite different to other greens I’ve used. I think it’s a Moda fabric by Holly Taylor and I actually bought more to make a Christmas quilt or wall hanging with, but it’s completely out of stock anywhere I’ve tried, so I’m conserving what I have left. The dark orange I salvaged from a block I took apart and have been trying to find a way to reuse it ever since, but there are some tans and some greens especially that it shouldn’t go anywhere near.

Sorry the background to the photo’s a bit confusing, it’s the wicker lid of my laundry basket because I took it outside to photograph in natural light but didn’t want to put it directly onto the concrete because it had been raining, so grabbed this to use.

I’ve got 13 blocks left to make for this quilt and have started on the next block though I’m worried it’s using too much of one fabric in the same block. I tried deciding on my next blocks at the weekend but it’s getting a bit mind-boggling now, trying not to repeat myself, wanting to use more of certain fabrics I’ve got left over but not having ones to match them with, etc. etc. I’m keen to move on to the next thing so must stay focussed!

3 more autumn blocks

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I made these over a couple of months, I think Nov – Dec., but thought I’d save them up to post them all together and a lot of time seems to have passed, with some intervening Christmas projects too. The last one is a rather wintery autumn, but I don’t care, I like it! Though whether the shade of green in it will tone with the other blocks is another matter…

I think these are blocks 47-49.

animalschrysanth2winter stag

The dark tan fabric that appears in all three, and the brown with a red and tan pattern that is in the first and last images, were both bought at the Knitting and Stitching Show I went to at Alexandra Palace in London in October and are by Moda. Don’t think I’ll be repeating the ‘Ally Pally’ experience, it was more expensive than the one at London Olympia I’ve been to in March and the heating was on so high I felt really ill at one point. I wasn’t the only one, judging from the red-faced persons fanning themselves; not much fun. Anyway, the fabrics with pine needles on are ones I bought in an online sale maybe last year and bought up what they had left to make a Christmas quilt one day, though I could have done with a bit more but it’s discontinued. I think they’re Holly Taylor for Moda. I really like her colour schemes.

In retrospect I’m not that keen on the middle one with the chrysanthemum, maybe a bit too brown, even though it is an autumn-themed quilt, there’s something depressingly 1970s living room about it, but I hope it’ll fit in with the rest okay.

I took all the blocks to show my Mum when I went to see the parents before Christmas, and we decided I need 14 more as well as the one I’m doing. So it must be 8 x 8 blocks though I forgot to count! The one I’m working on also has animals on it. Then I’m going to have to take stock again, count how many of the two different designs of block I have so I’ve got an even number at the end of it (!) and try and plan the next ones carefully. There are a few fabrics I’ve only used once and would rather include them in more than one block, for example, but then again there are some I used at the beginning that I wouldn’t choose now, like ones with a white background which aren’t great in an autumn quilt.

However, at home I’m making a baby quilt for my husband’s brother’s new baby, which was born on Saturday, so will of course prioritise that, then get down to the block planning. There’s also the pyjama bottoms I’m going to make for my brother and have bought the fabric for, so want to get on with those while the weather’s still cold, as it’s a warm brushed cotton fabric. So whether I’ll be able to plan blocks as well I’m not sure, could be it has to wait until February. Well, there are worse problems!