A new toy!

A few weeks ago I received a message from the president of the TMQG, asking if I'd be interested in a quilting frame. I'm sure you can guess what my answer was (!?!), and then I found out I was being offered it for free. WHAT? A lovely local quilter sadly passed away recently, and she wanted all her quilting things to go to people who would use them. So I was offered the quilting frame, and our guild now has a pile of equipment on hand for running kids workshops and so forth. I'm constantly amazed and grateful at how generous and wonderful quilty people are :o)

We picked up the frame a few weeks ago, and then last weekend we set it up in my garage aka studio. This thing is HUGE - 3m long, and about 1m wide. It meant a quick rearrangement of the garage, but it is now installed along one wall - and there is no longer any doubt that the garage is my sole domain ;o)

I decided to jump straight in and quilt the biggest top I've ever put together - my Birds and Bees colourblock quilt. I've been putting quilting this one off for a couple of years, due to the sheer size of it, and had been thinking about sending it to someone to long arm it. It's nice to be quilting it myself without needing a year's worth of massage, though!

Once I got the quilt loaded, and my machine on the frame, I realised I'd be fairly limited with what I can do. I only have about 3-4" I can quilt at a time, so it won't be great for large designs, but for straight lines and smaller designs (pebbles and such) it will be fabulous. I've spent the last two days quilting on it, and I'm slowly getting used to it. Up until now, I've never had thread breakage or tension issues on my machine, but I'm finding that's something I'm contending with while using the frame. I spent more time swearing and unpicking stitches with dodgy tension than actually quilting yesterday, but things went more smoothly today and I am about 3/4 of the way through. Considering the size of this quilt, only spending 6 hours or so quilting that much is insane - normally I'd have easily spent ten times that long. Eventually I will look at getting something with a larger throat space, but for now I'm very content.

I've decided to do dense straight lines on this quilt, strongly influenced by Leanne's style of quilting. I had wanted to quilt each colour block individually with different designs and blending thread, but I think this will be really effective - plus the texture is amazing. I'll have to get used to not seeing how it's looking until I take it off the frame though, the suspense is killing me at the moment! I'm hoping to get the rest done over the next few evenings, I can't wait to see it!

xx Jess

Quilting again!!

In an effort to blog more regularly, I've decided to start doing WIP Wednesday posts again for a while. I'm tending to make more time consuming projects these days, so rather than go weeks or months without posting, I think having a weekly 'check in' will work well :o) As a bonus, this week has seen the return of my motivation to sew at last! I've been feeling really flat since I came home from Austin (jet lag hit me hard), so it was a relief to want to go down to my studio again yesterday.

I was keen to start using some of the ideas I got from the classes I took with Angela Walters and Krista Withers, so I took my roll up of Cotton Couture from Polka.Dot.Tea Fabrics, sorted them by value and sewed the strips together until I had a quilt top. We got a couple of new furry family members while I was away, and I didn't realise how much more complicated basting a quilt would be with two kittens trying to eat the safety pins. (They fell asleep on the quilt after a while though, so I think it has kitten approval at least!)

From there, it was simply a matter of using some of the ideas Krista shared in the class I did, and trying out graffiti quilting for the first time (thanks to the amazing book of the same name by the ridiculously talented Karlee Porter. If you've never heard of her, go have a look now. I promise you won't be disappointed!) I'm about half way done - and I'm having an absolute blast. I'm using a double layer of 100% wool batting, and the texture it's giving this quilt is phenomenal. 

 

I have to admit I find this kind of quilting quite difficult - it's pushed me right out of my comfort zone. I guess it will get easier with practice, but even if it doesn't it is so much fun, and I'm determined to do more and more of it. I decided from the outset that I wouldn't rip anything out while I was quilting this quilt, but use it as a learning experience as much as anything. I have a tendency to be ridiculously critical of my work, so it's been quite liberating just letting myself play and not worrying too much about whether it's 'good enough'. Some areas of this work better than others, but I'm really happy with the overall texture so far :o)

 I'm hoping to get this one finished in the next week or so (especially since the intended recipient was born almost two weeks ago!). I have a stack of other things I should be doing rather than this (cough bee blocks cough) but I needed to get this idea out of my system first :o) 

xx Jess

Full Moon Lagoon Quilt {Blogger's Quilt Festival}

A couple of days ago I finally got around to binding and washing my Full Moon Lagoon quilt, just in time for this round of the Blogger's Quilt Festival. 

We took it out to the beach today for a bit of a photo shoot. Unfortunately, it happened to be a typical Tasmanian spring day (snow on the mountain, 13 degrees Celcius, gale force winds), so most of the photos looked something like this:

and this:

Not quite the idyllic calm blue sea I'd imagined as a backdrop for this quilt ;o) We did manage to find a relatively sheltered spot a bit further back on the dunes though - so you can see a teeny peek of the sea behind. This is the quilt front

and back.

Finishing this quilt has been very much a proud mama moment for me. The piecing itself was a lot of fun and made me realise how much I enjoy improv piecing. This quilt is basically a whole lot of improv pieced log cabins, pieced together like a puzzle using extra strips of fabric as needed. The fabric I used is the gorgeous Full Moon Lagoon by Mo Bedell for Andover fabrics - plus a whole bunch of other coordinating fabrics from my stash (lots of Lizzy House, Tula Pink, Anna Maria Horner and a few others). 

I really pushed myself with the quilting - I wanted to add loads of texture to the quilt top, using motifs reminiscent of being underwater (ripples, bubbles, swirls etc) without detracting from the quilt top. For the quilting, I chose a range of 50wt Aurifil thread to blend into the fabric as much as possible, so it didn't dominate the fabric but would add an abundance of texture. My quilting is not at all perfect - it's the not-quite-circular swirls etc that jump out at me when I look at it - but I am really pleased with what I achieved on my little domestic machine. And my little girl absolutely adores it, which is what really matters :o)

Most of the following photos I took in the relative (non windy) safety of our house.

Washing this quilt has made a massive difference to all the texture, and it has made it surprisingly soft and drapey considering the density of the quilting. I've gone a bit overboard with the photos here - these are some of my favorite parts of the quilt.

I didn't notice until I was looking through the photos that I actually missed the bottom corner of this seahorse block. Whoops! My camera had a really hard time photographing the pink accurately - the photo above is the closest to the actual colours.

I left many of the larger images (seahorses, flowers etc) un-quilted - and as a result they pop up from the background really nicely.

I also left some random strips entirely un-quilted, just to add a bit more variety to the quilt.

I was avoiding these feet in photos during the entire photo shoot - so I had to add just one in here. My three year old daughter is completely smitten with her newest quilt which makes all the (many, many) hours that went into to it completely worth it :o)

For the binding, I decided to piece a bunch of the left over strips together, vaguely following the colours around the edge of the quilt. It doesn't quite match each section completely - but it does well enough for an improv quilt, I think!

I've decided to enter this quilt into the Home Machine quilted category in the Blogger's Quilt Festival. It is entirely quilted on my Bernina QE440 (the same machine I use to piece and quilt all my quilts). A few people have commented during the making of this quilt that they didn't think this kind of quilting was possible on a domestic machine. It absolutely is - it just takes a really long time and a lot of quilt wrangling. I think the quilting on this one took around 30 hours, done a few hours at a time.

Quilt Stats:

* Fabric - Full Moon Lagoon by Mo Bedell, plus a range of coordinating fabric from my stash. 

* Quilt design - improvisationally pieced using log cabins.

* Size - finished size is about 70" square.

* Quilting - done by me on my domestic Bernina.

I hope you enjoy the rest of the festival! Huge thanks to Amy for organising this event again - it's definitely one of my favorite blogging events of the year. 

xx Jess