Baby Quilt

I finished my first commissioned quilt! Good friends of my sister became parents and she wanted to give them a baby quilt.
For this I took some gorgeous birch fabric and improv pieced around it. This was my first try at improv piecing and I have to say that although I love the result, the process was quite tedious and stretched my patience.

front

back

back close up

front close up

ready to give away

Stash Note #2

In between Christmas and Easter I didn't find much time to sew. With this much work however,  I desperately needed to relax procrastinate every now and then. So no sewing but procrastinating - how does this fit together? -> project planning and fabric shopping.
I probably have enough projects in line by now to keep me busy for a whole sabbatical (not that I'm having one) ;).
So here we go: I show you all the projects I'm planning and you can point with your finger on me by the end of the year for not finishing half of them *g*.

First is an update on stash note #1. I bought more of this beautiful fabric by Pat Bravo and some oakshott "sand" as solid. These will make a starburst quilt for me.

Second are some sea related blue fabrics. On the left is Tula Pink's "Salt Water" and on the right Deb Strain's "Seascapes". These fabrics have quite different hues of blue/ aqua but I'm planning for a scrappy quilt ("trip around the world"), so diversity is an advantage. My stash also contains a lot of blues/ aquas that go with these fabrics. This quilt is supposed to be for my uncle, who loves blue and the sea.

 Third are some really beautiful fabrics in white/ black/ grey: "architextures" by Caroly Friedlander fo Robert Kaufman and "faux bois" by Patty Sloniger for Michael Miller. I don't have a particular project in mind for these, maybe some paper piecing. (I got them here)

These amazing fabrics are the Lipari line by oakshott fabrics. They're shott cottons with one direction in black so they have this dark shine and look different from every angle. This makes them the perfect fabrics for a "male" quilt (for Tino). The only problem I'm having with these is the combination with other fabrics. Bright solids would work without doubt but I want to keep it very male - meaning greyish dark. I bought some other fabrics (!) here that might go with them. I have to give them much more procrastinating thought:

overdue updates

Is it really that long ago that I wrote my last blogpost? Time flies...
I have been busy nonetheless, I just forgot to write about the projects (and to take photos in some cases).
So here we go:
First the projects I finished for Christmas:

A bowtie quilt for my grandparents. My gandma expecially likes how the backing goes with their carpet which summarizes quite well how the orange does not work with the rest. A lesson learned...

I made a weighed pincussion organizer with this tutorial for my mum.

A few days before Christmas I finally finished the top for the sew.quilt.give bee. Jenn was so nice to make it into a quilt and even made a second babyquilt with the spare blocks.
I did not take any photos and accidently deleted her mail with hers, so no photos now.

In February was my grandpa's birthday. To my grandma's regret he is a lover and collector of stamps. I made him a sheath to transport stamps. It looks like a pencil case and I worked along some tutorials on the net. In the end it was quite hard to make because I used a lot of heavy interfacing to make it sturdy and to protect the stamps.

Uh, and there are so many projects in the making and in planning that there will be more news coming!

Work in progress

It's less than a month to Christmas Day and I'm already late with my presents. Thankfully I have had a moment of cleverness and planned only one self made present: a quilt for my grandparents.
Here is a photo of my work in progress:

It will be a bowtie quilt and right now this is my favourite layout. There are still a few blocks to sew to make it a nice size. I'm not quite sure how to proceed though.
Should I sew rows or should I first sew x and o blocks and than sew into rows?
Moreover I have to think of a quilting design. I could do an allover meandering design, but I was thinking to try something new this time. First of all I hope it makes the quilt more special and second I think the orange turned out to be less subdued than expected. So I was thinking to quilt the orange parts in a dense pattern and only to outline the other parts to make them pop out more.
Let's see.

Flower Prism Quilt

Even before I had finished my first quilt I could not resist the temptation to plan the next project (and to procrastinate). Those who know me know of my love for bold and flowery patterns. There are so many beautiful fabrics available, especially reprints of old 30s fabric and new fabric in retro style. So I bought lots of them. A really great way to show of these fabrics is by making large blocks. Squares are too boring so I decided for the beautiful (and free) Patchwork Prism pattern by Anna Maria Horner.Cutting the fabric took ages, but that's the point about procrastinating ;)
Here I made a first layout of the blocks. Sorry for the poor quality, there are so little bright hours now and there's a lot of raining.

If you're interested in this pattern you can find it here and a video with Anna Maria Horner giving tips for the pattern here.

Stash Note #1

This is the first time I ever bought a fat quarter bundle. I simply fell in love with the "Indie" collection by Pat Bravo. Maybe it's because of the unconventional combination of colours and patterns, I can't put my finger on it.

I had bought this to make a patchwork bag out of it, but the fabric is such a fine quality it would be a shame to use it for a heavy used item such as a weekender bag. So I pulled some fabrics out of my stack that might make a quilt when added to the Indie fabrics.

 I welcome any advise about adding/ deleting fabric from this stack!

Quilt N°1 - finished!

Finally! I have finished my first Quilt! (And I took a lot of photos of it ;) )

It was a great experience to make a quilt. There are so many steps in the making:

This year I started sewing with a few totes. Then I came across some fabric I liked and bought just for the look of it (the robots in green and blue). I browsed the internet for some more bag tutotials and came across Jessica's blog How About Orange. You know how it goes: I clicked here and there and ended up on Elizabeth's blog Oh, Fransson!. Elizabeth makes modern quilts and is great at explaining techniques. Her modern quilts were a real eye-opener. Here in Germany quilts are not so common and I only knew these that are made with batik fabrics. I admired their craft(wo)manship but I could not imagine me making a quilt like those. With these modern quilts however I felt that they were the perfect creative hobby for me. 

I bought Elizabeth's book "the practical guide to patchwork" and picked the "small plates" pattern. Now I could get started with my favourite part of the project: the choice of fabrics. I started only in blues and greens, added some browns until I came upon Lotta Jansdotter fabrics in beautiful orange. I decided to add orange to the brown stack and found the most beautiful (and most expensive) fabric to complete this stack:  Birch by Ink & Spindle in saffron. For the solid I used some great shot cotton by oakshott (by the way: They changed their online shop so now you can see the prices also in US$ and €).

Remember: this was all around Easter. By the end of June I had finished the blocks and decided for a layout. And then? - Well, for a long time there happened nothing. I had a lot of work to do (the money earning kind), other projects (birthdays!) and I did not quite know how to proceed. If you check the photo where I did the layout you can see, that the squares were no proper squares. That happened because my first (very cheap) sewing machine did neither have a 1/4" foot nor a walking foot and I was not experienced enough to manage anyway. I tried to sew rows but it turned out uneven. Hence I had to use my best friend the seam ripper quite a lot before I could go on.
Moreover I did not want my quilt to be the first piece to have a try at the techniques needed. Hence I made the placemats and baby quilts first - more time gone.
These summer holidays finally gave me the time needed to finish the quilt top and this autumn I managed to quilt and finish it - yeah!!!

It took a lot longer than anticipated by me but it was so much fun! There are already a few more projects in planning (even fabric bought and cut).
Today was glorious weather and I had to grab this opportunity to take a lot of photos of the finished quilt. Beware!

At our "Golden Gate Bridge"

 

With horses

  

The back