HEAT WAVE

So we are up to day 5 of a heatwave. The Bureau of Meteorology reports that a heatwave is declared if we have three consecutive days over 35C (95F), which honestly I think is a bit pathetic. Anyway, we are up to day 5 over 35C and the 3rd day over 40C (104F). The weather is forecast to be at least over 35C for another four days.

I've had our air conditioner running 24 hours a day since Monday, and this has managed to keep the inside temperature at a comfortable 24-28C (54-58F). But we haven't been venturing outside much, which is a bit disappointing for the week of school holidays.

Today, to stop the kids spending another day in front of the TV or other screen, we decided to make pencil cases.

We had a practice run with some Denise Schmidt fabric (its quilted so does it doing towards m7 12WIPS in 12 challenge??). I'm going to fill this one with lollies and use it as part of a birthday gift for Elizabeth's Class mate.

 The Elizabeth picked out some fabric and had a go. She did most of her own sewing (except for the zipper).

Matilda did a lot of her own quilting. I pieced together 2.5" squares of fabric left over from her aqua pop quilt and then put together the pencil case. She wanted hers long enough to fit a standard 30cm ruler.

 Ella was a last minute inclusion in the fun (she often gets invited over when we do kiddy sewing because she loves to craft). She picked some strawberry fabric with the same green spot as Elizabeths pencil case for the lining.

 We used bits and bobs for this project; salvaged zippers, scraps of fabric and left over bits of wadding.

 We used the same pattern for all the pencil cases, but they all turned out a little bit different- sometimes by design and sometimes by mistake!

MonSwoon

This is the colour design David picked! It's my least favourite and not at all the direction I was thinking this quilt would go. I really was loving the blue palettes.

 Well I did give him permission to decide didn't I? And at least I can say its a quilt we will both love (or both hate LOL). For the next step I went back to design seeds and pulled out some more colour palettes with green in them (and maybe a hint of ice blue. Tee hee hee). I forgot to photograph the colour cards that I printed off, but I ended up cutting up the colour cards and sorting the colours according to tone. My plan was to choose a background colour from the lightest tone (bottom row). The Swoon quilt needs 18 fat quarters of feature fabric, so I was going to select 6 dark tones (from the top row), 6 medium tones (second row) and 6 light tones (third row).

My initial concept was to use Kona Solids for the quilt and I spent a lovely morning looking through and matching up the colour cards with a kona solid. But then I started to second guess that choice. Perhaps Swoon wasn't quite the right pattern to showcase solids since its such an over sized block???

Next I spent that evening looking around the internet at fabric... specifically searching for bundles with greens and browns and beiges (with hints of blue) in them. I found this bundle of Batiks on Etsy that pleased me a lot. I have a love/hate with Batiks. I LOVE the intensity of colour, and that its a bit hippyish but I don't often see finished batik quilts that I like. I also wondered Swoon + batik??? would that work????

So then I started hunting around the Swoon-along flickr group and look what I stumbled upon:

(image source)

The whole quite is fabulous

(image source)

Seeing that one gave me the confidence that it will work, and when I showed David my various idea's (green kona solids, Batiks or something else) he was keen to go out on a limb and use the Batiks.

So that's where I'm at...A MonSwoon quilt; built with Batiks reminiscent of jungles and tropical islands. I have ordered a bundle of 21 fat quarters in green, brown and blue batiks with an even mixture of dark and light tones.

Another man shirt

This one actually started out as the 'calico' for the striped one and I only got so far as zipping up the shoulder and side seams then set in the sleeves, before I could see that the fit was fine and moved onto the real fabric. David said he's probably wear pale blue so I thought I'd finish it off. I used the overlocker to attach the grey marle binding and then coverstitched the bindings and hem.

I have been reading the kniterview series on the Made by Rae blog. Its basically a Q&A type thing with other bloggers who ejoy sewing with knits. The blogger, during their interview, suggests tips for sewing with knits, where they buy fabric etc. The thing that has my head scratching is that most those interviewed admit to using only a sewing machine when sewing with knits. Can I just say that I had absolutely NO JOY sewing knits with a regular sewing machine?! The garments looked ok to start with, but pretty quickly stitches would bust, causing seams to pop and hems fall down etc. Buying an overlocker improved things significantly, but I still had lots of issues with hems busting (as they were done on the sewing machine). The Coverpro, which allows me to hem knit fabrics with ease, has finally put me in a place where I am completely confident I can turn out a durable knit garments that will last wear after wear and wash after wash.

Designing a Swoon

I am one little step closer to making a swoon quilt. I am having trouble with the colour scheme and I want David to also be happy with it also (ie not too girly or floral). I decided to look through Design Seeds for some colour palettes, printing off half a dozen that appealed to me. I tend to lend towards blues/greys/creams when I decorate my bedroom, so I deliberately tried to pick out some greens as well.

Then I used a really neat website, that I just happened to read about today on a blog, to do some digital versions of the swoon quilt. The website is Quiltr, and it has a lone star block that happens to be fairly similar to the Swoon block. So I plugged in some colours and printed off the 'quilts'. I am going to let David decide which one we should go with, and then I will hunt out fabrics to match the appropriate Design seeds colour swatch.

Once decision I have made with regards to the Swoon block, after seeing lots of them pop up on blogs and on Flickr, is that I prefer the look of a dark tone in the centre star and its radiating points, and a lighter tone (even better its a light tone of the same colour) for the other feature colour. So that's how I will use my design seeds colour palettes when selecting fabric. ie the lightest tone on the palette will be the background colour, the two darkest tones will be used for the centre star and radiating points and the mid-tones will be used for the other colour components of the Swoon star.

I *think* I know which one is my favourite colour scheme. I'll be back to let you know what David decides on.

Man shirt

My husband admired this stripe back when I made this t-shirt for George. I used a bit more of it here and he mentioned, again, how he would like a t-shirt made from it. I got a bit side-tracked with quilts in the mean time, but today I finally decided to give it a go and use my new Coverpro before it started to collect dust.

I asked David to give me his favourite t-shirt and used it to carefully trace off a pattern. I thought this was better that road testing some commercial patterns. Men's patterns are pretty dire. And yes I had to cut the sleeves sideways on the fabric because I didn't have enough to cut it on the grain. David didn't even notice so I didn't mention it :)

I'm pretty happy with how similar the new shape compares with the original.

I just love the coverpro. I hadn't played with it since my first experiments 6 weeks ago so I was pretty nervous I had forgotten what to do. It didn't help that I had to rethread the machine with a different colour thread (it came already threaded up in white).

Neck binding

Sleeve hem.

I meant to have the twin needle on the outside but accidentally put the wrong side of the garment through the machine! 

Hubba hubba!

SALE!

I'm just updating my tin whistle shop for the new year. All my pram liner stock is on sale and I have some custom order slots available.

Vintage musings

 So here is how things looked at the end of yesterday. Let me take you on a quick tour...

 I finished piecing the vintage sheet charm quilt. I've ordered some vintage flannel for the back so this project is stalled while I wait for that to arrive.I might end up making this my February finish for the 12WIPS12 challenge. We'll see.  

I had 8 charms left over so I used 6 of them to make this simple little baby quilt- its about 20"x25". I already had the stripe and kona solid.

 I want to get this finished up quickly, so I decided to piece together some bits and bobs for the backing fabric rather than wait for the vintage flannel.  

Remember my commitment to make one hexie block a month? This is January's one. I have 9 made, with 6 to go.

Making a start on the Vintage sheet charm quilt

 Boy I'm on a quilty roll aren't I? When I accept a challenge I tend to work ahead of shedule.

I completely stress out if I leave things to the last minute. But the problem is that I tend to do the opposite... stress out making sure things are finished well ahead of schedule.

This project is number nine on my list of 12 WIPS in 2012 =====>

I bought the charms last September from Etsy. 

I love the idea of a vintage sheet charm quilt, but knew I would never have the patience to trawl Op shops collecting sheets.

I bought the charms here. I follow this lady's blog and when she announced she was offloading her collection of vintage sheet charms on Etsy I snapped up 3 sets of 36 charms.

All the for bargain price of $31.50 including shipping to Australia!

This has allowed me to layout the charms in a 10x10 arrangement and will result in a generous lap quilt. It will look fabulous on the couch I showed you in my last post don't you think?

Giddy quilt finished

Well that was a nice quick finish... four day turnaround for a quilt. Not bad for me!

As previously discussed this is my own drafted up version of the Swoon block.
I discussed the layout here and here.

For the quilting I went quick and simple (I'm due to catch up with the new mum this week) with a all over meander in a light grey.

The only fabric shopping I did for this quilt was to pop up to Spotlight and buy 30cm of fabric for the binding. 

I didn't have anything suitable in my stash.

I picked out this stripe as you just cant go past a nice striped binding.

I went with the mish-mash backing using up all the left over scraps from the front and adding in a piece of grey TaDot and a small strip of Alexander Henry Larkspur.

I think it falls on the side of 'arty' rather than 'frugal piecing'. That's what I'm telling myself anyway!

I'm loving my newly furnished formal lounge for photographing.

 After a 3 year search we finally found our perfect sofa's for the room and they are proving to be a perfect backdrop for photographing quilts. The lighting in front of the window is great. and the room is usually tidy so its an easy location to set up a quilt or two!

I love the arm chair most of all. We are slowly buying accessories for the room, like this gorgeous lamp I found in a store selling restored mid-century furniture and bric-a-brac.

PS... while technically this quilt uses up some of my Denise Schmidt 'Picnic's and Fairground's' fabric, which is #10 on my 12WIPs in 2012 list, my original post indicated that I intended to make "a couple of small quilts I could donate to a hospital NICU". So, unless someone thinks I am cheating, I will carry this quilt over to another month and call the WIP complete when I have made at least one more quilt from the DS fabric.

Still working on Swoon (Giddy) baby quilt

 It's only been a day, but I have progressed nicely on this quilt. This morning I stitched all the units together  to complete the Swoon (Giddy) block and added some grey sashing. 

 I really wanted to just add a one nice big sash of grey and leave it at that- ie the swoon block floating on grey. But alas, I only had enough grey left over to do 1" of sashing around the block.

 With the small sashing I had a quilt of only of 26.5" square. So I started auditioning borders in order to push the quilt up to around 35" square. Knowing the friends that this is for I knew I should keep to the soft blue and grey colour scheme. I know, I know... hard for me right? No brights, no extra colours and no pops of red. Yikes! 

 Of course it doesn't help that most of the fabric I bought in the Picnics and Fairgrounds range does not actually have blue in it!

I came up with 3 options, and decided to audition all 3 for a day.

 Border option #1: Use up the last little bit of the two feature fabrics from the main block. Problem... not much of it left and I would end up with a really skinny 1" border.

Border option #2: Cut out the blue sections from the green/blue P&F plaid. Problem... would require a trip to Spotlight to buy some more of the plaid and this is supposed to be a stash buster project.

Border option #3: A border using the blue/white lattice print from the P&F range. Problem... too white/light? compared to the rest of the quilt.

 I got on with other stuff (you know like feeding children/housework etc) and let my subconscious mull it over.

The solution seemed obvious when I returned to sew after dinner. Option 1 AND option 3!! I added in the plaid to the two feature fabrics and this allowed me to create a 3" piano key border. The quilt will end up about 33" square, which will be a great size for a newborn baby.

I briefly contemplated throwing in some red corner posts...

But, my recipients tastes not withstanding, I decided it looks much better without.

I think I am going to have to do a mish-mash backing- you know where you just sew random bits of fabric scraps left over from the quilt top. I don't really like that sort of backing but I don't have a nice large piece of something that I can use instead.

Even this A.H. Larkspur, which goes perfectly, is a smidgen too small.

I have plenty of this turquoise bird fabric, but its just not quite the right colour.

Stay tuned!

David came into the sewing room just now and commented on the Swoon (Giddy) quilt by saying "Wow that looks nice". I think its the first time he has ever made a positive comment to me about a quilt pattern. He often compliments me on what I sew (as in; the skill shown or whatever) but without actually saying whether he likes the finished product or not. There's a difference obviously,  I know for myself that I can marvel at and be awe struck by the work other quilters do, even though I think the finished quilt is awful. I mention his comment only because the fact that he has specifically complimented the Swoon pattern has cemented my desire to make this one up as a quilt for our bed.