New and current projects

As you may have noticed, I tend to post about my lofty plans when there is no real quilting content to be had here ...

With my Quilt-in-a-Day No 3 finished and awaiting its first wash, my plane pillow planned and the fabric collection for the calendar quilt well under way, I am looking for a new opportunity to avoid working on my Night on the Tiles.

This will be a charity quilt for the Annual Charity Event at my local International Women's Club. I am super-tempted to go to IKEA on Friday and peruse their fabric collection, putting my "no fabric in 2009 pledge into serious peril. I think I will have to spend some time digging through my stash to see what I can find. Actually, some of that Westfalen fabric that I overstocked on comes to mind ... and with it a first idea. How very Kant-esque of me to be developing my projects whilst rambling about them on my blog!

Theo's Planes on the design wall

I think I found all the scraps I need for the plane appliqué. The propellors will be yellow, body dark-blue, wings light blue and rudder medium blue.

L in a circle

All I need to do now is tie up the loose threads and wash, then 'm done.

Time elapsed: 5,25 hours. Stitching the "L" took me all of a few minutes but I wanted to practise first.

Yay, I won an award for one of my quilt photos

It's no biggie, really, but I'm chuffed! Thanks, Magik Quilter!!!

Will this work?

I am quite excited about this little project. Yesterday, I pulled out my scraps and left-overs from previous projects and assorted lofty plansto have a look at what would work together. As it turns out, a lot of fabric purchased for projects for his older brother will go into Theo's Planes Pillow.

Having done little machine piecing and even less machine applique, I'm looking forward to sinking my teeth into this one.

Deadline is Good Friday.

Knitted blanket for my babies

When I was pregnant with my first daughter, I was convinced I'd have a boy. But in order to not tempt the Preggo Gods too much, I decided to stick to a relatively neutral scheme when knitting a blanket.

This was before I learned how to quilt.

My first attempts at machine quilting

Ages ago, I took a maching quilting class. They requested we bring a sandwich and I had absolutely no time to prepare anything so I took this HORRENDOUS (! yes, this seriously asks for capitalisation, it's that ugly) yellow fabric with elephants and flowers, put some baby pink voile over it and used some random pink fabric for backing. Five minutes and I was done.

Nowadays, this is a doll quilt and I just looked at the quilting. Not too back for a first attempt.

Actually almost done!

Time elapsed: 5 and a half hours.

After ripping out the wrangled seams of where I broke not one but two machine needles because of sticking to the wrong settings, I appliqued all three dots. And me likey! All that's missing is the "L" and tidying up loose ends.

In fact I was so pleased with the result that I rebooted my notebook to bring you this post!

And then I went and broke two needles

Time elapsed: 3 hours plus 1 hour last night equals a total of 4 hours.

Aaaaargh! I set the stitch width and all such things to what was listed as allowed and broke not one but two needles in ten minutes. Now I have to rip part of the very tight seam and redo it.

But I am making decent progress, having cut and ironed the circles and pinned them to where I want them to be.

Now my husband and I are in disagreement as to where to add the "L". He wants a more traditional balanced look, I want something a bit more quirky and modern.

Almost looks like it's finished.

Time elapsed: 3 hours

I cut the piece of fleece from a larger blanket that had rounded corners and used the one corner as a guidance for the other three

While bias binding works wonderfully on round corners, I'm not sure I'm really keen on the whole process. Cutting on the bias - or any kind of rotary cutting - is a drag, really, and I get frustrated with myself quite quickly.

But once the whole thing was assembled and ironed (no less than four (that's 4! for those who know how little I enjoy ironing), I just clipped it to the fleece using my nifty binding clips. Then I whipped around the blanket using a zig-zag stitch and I was done! Yay! I got the encouragement from Malka and her blue coasters, thanks Malka!

Now, I'm adding three circles cut from the darker pink fabric. Then Ill piece an "L" to the largest one to personalise it for its recipient.

The weekend is near!

As I was dreaming about my upcoming weekend ... and making lofty plans, I realise that I have way too many projects lined up.

But with hubby gone from early Friday till Saturday afternoon, I plan on having a quilting evening in on Friday and I might even get a little bit of sewing done during the day on Saturday.

First up: Lucia's quilt, seeing how this is supposed to be a "quilt in a day", finished inside of ten hours.

Crocheting Pattern

I love zig-zaggy woollen things, having done the Chevron scarf and all, and was looking for a project-on-the-side to crochet. Look what I found:
Comfort Stitching's Zig Zag Blanket.

More research on a really boring Monday afternoon yielded these:



Attic24's neat ripple pattern comes highly recommended

eHow.com's crochet zigzag throw and

freevintagecrochet.com's crocheted zig zag afghan

Bees and Challenges

There are a lot of bees and challenges going 'round the Internets at the moment and I am always tempted to join. Usually, I am afraid of completely over-loading myself with projects and work and tend to shrink away from them to save my sanity.

However, this one sounds so simple and relatively non-committal that I will make this my first:

.

I may not do strips but blocks and not one per day. But I like the idea of being guided by weather / light / momentary sense of being. Let's see what happens!

3 home-made blankets each

Last night, as I was tucking in my girls, I put three blankets I had made myself on each kid. That felt wonderful!

Carola was covered by her sampler, Crocheting Madness and her Princess Quilt.

Paula was tucked into her her sampler, her Dotty Princess Quilt and a blanket I knit in 2002 in expectation of my first babe.

Next Projects

Tomorrow my sewing machine will return from its week at the "spa" (aka repair shop), I am planning my next projects (instead of working ...)



1.) A quickie baby quilt for Lucia, my third "quilt in a day". Lucia is the second child of our Argentine-Italian-Spanish friends living in London: white fleece bound in white-ish left-overs of my Moda Quilt Pink stash plus a few circles in darker colours from the same range, one to incorporate an "L". I will time the time spent on this and we shall see whether this is the quickest project yet.

2.) A plane pillow for Theo, little bro to Harrison of the Dragon Quilt. Theo is not my godson but because I started making things for non-godchildren, I figured that he needed something of his own as well. It'll be based on Sky Dreams