Typewriter cushion

I've seen a few quilts and cushions in this style popping up around the internet and I just love them. The typewriters are fabulous anyway, but the pairing of one with some newspaper print is sublime. 

The typewriters are, of course, Kokka from the Ruby Star Shining range. I used a newspaper print fabric from Moda's Sweetwater range. The striped piping and polka dot backing are both from Riley Blakes My Minds Eye range.

I used raw edge applique to attach the typewriter to the bottom right of the cushion front. I added a layer of wadding to the front too and quilted a 1" diamond grid all over it (except for the typewriter). There is a Zipper hidden behind the piping in the bottom seam of the cushion.

Camera bag insert

A friend asked me recently if I would make her a padded insert to protect her camera inside a regular hand bag. I thought that sounded like a really good sewing challenge, and immediately accepted.

 Turns out there are lots of tutorials online for this sort of thing, see here, here and here. I didnt end up using any of them word for word, but found the lil blue boo tutorial to be the one that helped me the most with techniques and allowed me to really visualise what I wanted my insert to look like. I havent made an exact copy of her padded camera insert, but I dont think I could have made mine without her excellent tutorial.

I started out with a quick trip to a foam supplier and bought some 1" thick foam at a cost of approx $10. My friend and I had already discussed her needs and measured up the camera and lenses and I had sketched a 'box' using these dimensions. I cut the foam pieces to size using the sketch and then used a hot glue gun to glue the foam pieces into a box.

I eased myself into the sewing by starting with the movable foam dividers, covering them with fabric and adding velcro to the sides.

The next step required a lot of thinking, and measuring and careful drawing of my design. Then I cut and sitched the outer fabric shell. I noticed that a lot of the tutorials did not include any extra pockets or storage, so after discussion with my friend we decided some gusseted pockets on the side would be good for lens caps and a zippered pocket at one end would be useful also.

I decided to be a little bit playful with the zippered pocket, incorporating some gumnut babies. My friend has just recently moved to Australia from Holland, so it just seemed kind of appropriate to add in a bit of Aussie.

I missed a few photo's in here (got caught up with the sewing). But the next stage was to create a smaller fabric shell to line the inside of the foam box. This insert has velcro stitched horizontally along the long sides and the foam dividers attach to this and stay in place (but can be moved as required). To close the top edge of the fabric shells I hand stitched some red polka dot bias binding in place. I also anchored the foam corners to the fabric by handstitching those in place.

So there we have it! A padded foam camer bag insert. This was really juicy and challenging project that I really enjoyed creating.

I Spy Hexagon quilt {WIP 6 of 12}

Well after a mammoth quilting effort over the last couple of weeks I have finally finished this quilt. Here is a post which explains how I built the quilt top, but there are plenty of other posts scattered through my blog as I have been working on this quilt for 13 months!

I could have gone in so many directions with the sashing and borders in this quilt. The safe and 'modern' version would have been to sash in white, which I think would have looked fabulous. But I really wanted to gift this quilt to my son and white just didnt seem a practical and manly enough choice for him.

I think I have come up with a pretty unique interpretation of a few popular quilt techniques and styles; I Spy quilt, paper piecing, and the sashed block. Whether it 'works' I leave for you to decide, but personally I love it :)

I had a last minute change of plan with the borders, ripped off a grey outer border and introduced some black and white polkadot. I then took the quilt down to my local quilt stores (LQS) and picked out the backing and borders.

For the backing I used some Denise Schmidt fabric (current range at Spotlight). This was very hard to pick, as I tend to gravitate towards funny juvenile prints, and I had to keep forcing myself back to plainer prints. I also felt it had to be a predominately one colour (preferably grey) with some blue or black in it to tie in with the front and border.

The quilting.... It took F O R E V E R!!! but I knew I would love it. I stitched a 1" grid over the entire centre area of the quilt, ditched around the skinny striped border, and then stitched 1/2" lines around the outer polka dot border. The 1" grid will serve a second function at stabilising the hand stitching in all those hexagon blocks.

Here is how the 1" grid looks on the back.

I gave George the quilt this morning, and he immediately sat on it and began picking his favourite hexagon from each block (he was too quick for me to photograph properly...). I didnt start out thinking of this project as an 'I spy' quilt, but because so many of the hexagons feature 'things' that is essentially what this quilt is. A very fancy, scrappy Ispy quilt.

I love this pic. He put the quilt on the floor and invented some sort of game involving sharks in rivers and an alien man killing (or saving??) them.

Tin whistle March-June 2012

I haven't done one of these posts for a while as this blog has morphed more into a space to show off my personal creations rather than a 'face' for my business.

  Lately, however, I have been enquiries about pram accessories via this blog. I think people are stumbling across my old blog posts via Google and it would be pretty natural to wonder if I still make pram liners when I don't share photo's of them any more.

Well, Yes I sure do still make pram accessories!

I spend 2 days a week sewing for 'Tin Whistle' and make anywhere from 2 to 6 pram liners a week. About 80% of my Tin Whistle time is spent on custom orders, which is why my store looks pretty empty most of the time.

Tin whistle now has a Facebook page, and I am trying to slowly shift most of my updates about my business there.

However... I think once every few months I might just put up a photo mosaic here.

After all, they represent a fair bit of sewing time :)

Here is a mosaic of 25 pram liners (of about 40) I have made in the last 3 months.

1. City mini pram liner, 2. Universal pram liner and stowable blanket, 3. City mini pram liner and stowable blanket, 4. City Select pram liner, 5. City Select pram liner, 6. City mini pram liner, 7. City mini pram liner, 8. Universal pram liner, 9. universal pram liner, 10. City Select pram liner, 11. City Select pram liner, 12. Universal pram liner, 13. Universal pram liner, 14. City Select pram liner, 15. City Select pram liner, 16. City mini pram liner and stowable blanket set, 17. Universal pram liner, 18. Universal pram liner, 19. Universal pram liner, 20. City mini pram liner, 21. City mini pram liner, 22. City Select pram liner, 23. City mini pram liner, 24. City mini pram liner, 25. City Select pram liner

Liberty Scarf

I caved... and decided to put aside the hexie quilt for a day and work on something else.

I pulled out this little scarf kit I bought from Calico and Ivy during the week. Amazing simple, yet gorgeous (price tag to match too!). The kit consisted of five 1" strips of Liberty lawn fabric (My fav is the birds) bundled up with a 10" strip of fine hessian (its probably not actually called hessian, but no better way to describe it really).  

I just eyeballed the strips into place and pinned them.

Then stitched them down, ie raw edge applique.

You cant really see it but I also did a very small/narrow zig zag all the around the hessian edge, about 1/2" in from the edge.

Chuck in the wash then tumble dryer to fluff it up and rag up the edges. Viola!

And now I can say I am up with the trendies by having sewn some Liberty fabric!

Just keep quilting....

I'm quilting a one inch grid all over my hexie quilt. The grid is on point though. Does that make it an one inch diamond grid?

What WAS I thinking!???

I've stitched all the quilt lines in one direction. That took me about 4 hours. Keeping the lines an even 1" as well as making sure they were 45" to the side of the quilt just about did my head in.

Now I've just started the grid lines in the other direction- generating the 1" diamonds.

Here is the back.

I have about 3.5 hours of sewing to go.

It better bloody be worth it!

Pinky pink baby quilt

Earlier in the year my cyber quilt group decided to make a baby quilt to gift to one of our pregnant members. It was all organised in secret by AJ, with messages going around Australia via Facebook. The brief was to make a 12.5" block using pink and white fabric and send it to AJ, who would sew them all into a quilt top, sandwich, quilt and bind the quilt.

The quilt was gratefully received by its new owner this week and she posted up this photo of her new baby testing it out.

AJ did a fabulous job combining all the blocks by sashing them, and framing then them with scraps of pink fabric sent back with the blocks.

My block is in the bottom left. I decided to hand stitch a block using the English paper piecing method.

I first drew a design out on paper. For reference the sides of the centre diamonds are 1" long.

When I was happy with the design I selected some pink fabrics from my stash.

I precut all the fabrics, being careful to maintain symmetry around the stripes and spots, as well as fussy cut smaller images.

Here are some pictures of the hexagon coming together. The yellow thread is used to tack the fabric around the paper shapes, and removed after all the pieces have been hand stitched together.

Somewhere along the line I decided to turn the hexagon into a star and hand stitched on the points and the white background fabric.

Here is how it looked when all the hand stitching was complete and the yellow tacking thread removed.

I trimmed it down, but was a bit short of the required 12.5" block size

So I machine stitched on some white sashing and squared it up again.

Some more closeups

The back of the block!

And that's the story about my block in the Pinky pink baby quilt.

By popular vote

The black and white polka dots won.

I trimmed down the first grey border to 1" (from 3"), added a 1" stripe border then finished off with a 5" black and white polka dot border. The quilt top is now 60" x 90".

I've now sandwiched it and have begun quilting. I've chosen a time consuming 1" all over grid... on point to the main design. It will take a fair bit of work to get it all done, but I still have 20 days until the end of June!