Breaking Storm (Finished and Featured)

A new issue of Quilters Companion magazine comes out on Thursday this week, the latest modern quilts special issue. My quilt, Breaking Storm, is one of six quilts in the magazine, along with designs from Faith Jones, Tracey Petersen, Liz Pinczewski, Michelle Marvig and Jane Davidson.

I am so excited to be able to finally show you this quilt - I finished it in June last year, so it has been a long year keeping it quiet. We went to a park a few weekends ago, and I took Breaking Storm for a wee photo shoot.

This quilt is made using the traditional Snail Trail block. As the name suggests, Breaking Storm is supposed to be reminiscent of a dark, stormy sky at the end of a storm, when the sun and blue sky is just peeking through the roiling clouds.

This is one of the biggest quilts I've made - it finishes at 72" x 96". It's quilted with a range of Aurifil threads - variegated grey Aurifil 40wt thread across the grey 'background', and blue and orange 50wt thread in the coloured sections. I'm really pleased with the texture I achieved on this quilt - I quilted air-currents and pebbles and square spirals in the grey areas, and straight lines in the coloured sections. I think the quilting complements the design quite well.

I haven't seen the magazine yet, but there is a profile on me in there (which I'm super excited about, but I'm also a bit nervous to see what they've written!) I will be stalking the newsagent on Thursday for sure!!

I'm off to have a coffee or seven - Quiltcon registration opened at 1am this morning here in Australia, so I'm trying to cope on about 4 hours sleep. It was totally worth waiting up though, I managed to get all the classes I wanted (and I'm thrilled that I'll get to meet all three of my biggest quilty inspirations - Angela Walters, Lisa Sipes and Krista Withers! Pinch me!) :o) I guess it's completely official that I'm going now (and I am ridiculously excited about it!! Will I get to meet you there?!?

xx Jess

Rainbow Snail Trail Mini Finished!

I finished most of this quilt back in February, and had half-stitched the binding down and then it languished unfinished on top of our piano with all the other mini quilts waiting to be hung somewhere (yes, we are very lazy in this household ;o) ). I took me about an hour last night to finish stitching the binding (whilst watching a couple of episodes of Spaced - so excited they are replaying this series!) Cue photos.

Despite the miserable, grey day today, this one was a good little model and behaved itself perfectly for the photos.

A couple on my favorite bush in our garden (such a great colour!)

I quilted this one in the grey areas in straight lines following the edge of the rainbow trails, spacing the lines about 1/4" apart.

Quilt Stats:
Design: my own, using snail trail blocks
Fabric: a range of rainbow scraps (including Lizzy House, Denyse Schmidt, Jenean Morrison, Joel Dewberry) Kona Coal, Kona medium grey
Size: 24" x 24"

This quilt is about 90% HSTs, so I'm entering it into the Festival of HSTs over at Canoe Ridge Creations. Stay tuned for entry number 2 later today!!

xx Jess

Rainbow trail mini - progress

I am a little (well, okay more than a little) obsessed with these blocks at the moment. I'm really enjoying playing around with colours and value with them and seeing what I can create. I've decided to make a snail trail block for my 4x5 Bee hive members (yes I know. MORE of them...) and one of our group asked for rainbow colours with a dark grey background. Cue me trying to work out how to make it work, and pulling a couple of piles of rainbow fabrics (SO much fun - I'd never done it before, but I see some rainbow quilts in my future!)

I decided to make a couple of trial blocks to see how it worked - and then though I might as well make them into a mini while I was at it. So I made four rainbow snail trail blocks over the last couple of nights. My original plan was a layout something like this:

But once I'd made the blocks it just didn't look quite right - not how I'd imagined it. I actually stuffed up the blocks when I sewed the four patches - I wanted the light and dark grey to alternate on the sides (which I think would have looked better). So then I tried flipping tow of the blocks to create this:

Again, it didn't quite look like I wanted - and I didn't like how the eye was drawn to that centre bit. So I flipped them all so that the centre of the mini was the light and dark grey:

I really like this placement. I love the rainbow running around the edges of the quilt, and how the greys look in the centre. So I sewed them together, and was pleasantly surprised by how well the points matched up (a bit of easing required though ;) ) I started quilting it last night with straight lines about 1/4" apart. I toyed with doing dense FMQ on the grey, but the geometric lines in the quilt really sang straight lines so I went with that. I'm pretty happy with how it looks so far:

I don't think I'll quilt the coloured parts at all (or if I do, just do a single line of quilting close to the edge). I'll straight line quilt the corner sections as well.

I'm stoked to nearly have my first finish of 2012 - yay for mini quilts :)

Happy stitching,
Jess

Snail Trail Block Tutorial

The snail trail block is one of my favourite traditional blocks - there are so many things you can do with this block in terms of fabric placement and colour choices. These blocks are 12 1/2" unfinished (12" finished).

You'll need at least two different fabrics (although I've used four for the tutorial), and this block works best if you have a high contrast in value between your fabrics. Because you'll be working with exposed bias edges a lot, starch is your friend. It really makes it so much easier to not stretch your triangles when you're handling them! Use a scant 1/4" for all your seams.

Since I made this with four fabrics, I'll go through cutting using four, and mention what do to if you want to use two.

From each of your four fabrics you'll need to cut the following squares. If you're using two different fabrics, you'll still only need to cut these squares, but you'll need (2) 2 5/8" squares from each fabric rather than one.

Set aside your four 2 5/8" squares until later. For each of your larger squares, cut in half along the diagonal to yield two half-square triangles. To do this, I line up my 45 degree line on my ruler with the bottom of the square, and position the ruler so it runs corner to corner.

Do this for all twelve of your squares. You should end up with the following pieces from each fabric (so four lots of these triangles). If you're using four different fabrics, you'll have another spare set of twelve triangles. If you're using two fabrics you'll end up using all the triangles.

Ok, that's the cutting done. Now we can go back to the 2 5/8" squares. Sew these into a four patch, with the light colours on opposite sides like so:

I press my seams open for this step, but for the remaining steps I press to the side. I have tried pressing open and there were parts of the block that were insanely bulky.

Take your finished four patch and place the smallest set of triangles around it. We'll be sewing the lighter fabrics to either side first (the greens in this block).

When positioning your triangles for sewing, match up the point of the triangle to the centre seam of the four patch (see the little white arrow in the photo below) 

Press your seam to the side, and then repeat for the light fabric on the opposite side. Press this seam outward as well. 

Repeat this for the two darker fabrics, matching points and pressing as for the lighter fabrics. You'll end up with a square with little tails in the centre of each side. 

This next step is important - I neglected to do it for my first couple of blocks and wondered why my points weren't matching up between each round of triangle. You need to trim your block 1/4" away from the corners of the four patch and square it up in the process. For this round this will be a very small amount of fabric.

Once your block is trimmed and square, you can start sewing on your second round of triangles. The second round of triangles are the middle-sized ones (cut from the 5 1/4" squares). Again, sew the lighter fabric on first.

Lining up your triangles is a little trickier for this round. First match the point of your triangle to the centre of the four patch:

Then gently shift your triangle down into place  and pin it.

Once the four triangles are sewn and pressed, you'll need to trim 1/4" away from the points as you did after the first round of triangles. This time, try to line up one of the lines of your ruler with one of the seams in the four patch, so your trimmed edges are parallel to the four patch.

You're ready to sew on the final round of triangles. As for the other two rounds, sew the lighter ones first. Like you did in the first round of triangles, match the point of the triangle to the centre of the four patch.

Sew and press all four triangles, and you should finish up with this (after trimming and squaring up to 12 1/2").

I'm linking up to Tutorial Tuesday at Lawson and Lotti


Enjoy making these blocks, they are really fun :)

xx Jess

My first snail trail block!

Over the last two or three nights, I put together my four-patches for my High Seas quilt - so now its 'just' a matter of putting them all together. Phew. This one just took me nearly 1 1/2 hours to finish (and I think I'll need to redo it anyway...) - and there are 42 blocks all together, so its going to be a fairly labour intensive exercise. I hope its worth it - its still a little hard to work out if its going to look ok or not.

Only problem is they are meant to finish at 9" (so 9 1/2" unfinished) - and this one is very close to 10". I'm really not used to this - usually my 'tricky' blocks finish small, so I'll need to work out what's going on. You can probably see the points don't all quite match up - so obviously I've gone wrong somewhere in my piecing. Not sure where - I used really accurate 1/4" seams. I did press my seams open though (which caused a lot of bulk in some places) so the next one I'm going to press them toward the triangles, and see if that makes a difference with matching the points, and getting the size right.

If anyone has experience making these blocks, some tips on how you pressed them would be appreciated. I have become used to pressing seams open (I really like the sharper seams I get doing it that way) - but I am thinking it might be better to press to one side for these blocks, to reduce bulk where the points meet...

Off to try another one and see if I can get it to work!

I'm linking up to Manic Monday at Sew Happy Geek (also go check out her QAL starting very, very soon! It's going to be fun!)



happy stitching,
Jess