Rhapsodia Winner

Thanks to everyone who entered the Rhapsodia giveaway, and welcome to my new followers :o)


So without further ado, Mr Random has chosen number 389...


Kathy who said: Yummy fabric, Congrats on your blog milestones!

Congratulations Kathy, I'll send you an email soon :o)
Don't forget I still have a giveaway running for Lucy's fugly fabric party - ending on Tuesday!
xx Jess

Why I love making quilts...

PS - the cruddy old couch you see is being replaced with a brand new red leather one on Monday! Sooo excited! And yes, my little guy is wearing my beanie :o)

xx

My Precious Retro Flowers Update

Now that I've finally gotten my other commitments out of the way, I'm back into the swing of My Precious Retro Flowers. I am determined to do this one through to the finish now I have time (although there does need to be a wee babby quilt made in the next few weeks for my bestie, who's about to have baby number 5...)

So. I still only have one complete flower done (and the petals are still seperate).

But I have actually been working on it! This is my pile of sewn and trimmed curves:

My pile of curves ready to be trimmed:

My stack of fabrics ready to be cut:

My cut fabric ready to be sewn:

And a couple of flowers ready to be pressed and trimmed.

The plan at this stage is to make 25 flowers, and have a wider border (around 10") so we can use this one on our bed.

I'm hoping to have a few more flowers done by the end of the weekend!

x Jess

Desperate House Wives QAL - Woven Chevron Block Tutorial

I was really excited to have the opportunity to design a block for Jane's Desperate House Wives quilt. And then I got stressed (I've never designed a block from scratch before). And then I went into denial about having to do it. And finally last night I was mucking around with Touchdraw (using Lynne's fantastic tutorials) and came up with this:

I'm calling it Woven Chevron block (cos I'm so great at coming up with creative names for things!). Why woven? Well, if you put multiple blocks together, you'll get something like this:

That's only four blocks, but you get the idea...

So how to make this little pretty? I used solids for mine (Kona Ash, Kona Orange and Kona Surf) but you could use any combination of solids/prints. I'd probably avoid directional fabrics cos it would be quite tricky to make it all line up.

I did actually take photos for the first part of this tutorial, but then my camera died, and we didn't have ANY batteries around. So you'll have to bear with descriptions for the first part sorry!

Anyhoo, you'll need to cut:

From background fabric (Ash):

* Four 2 1/2" squares

* Four 3" squares. 

* Two 3 1/2" squares

From colour 1 (Surf):

* Four 3" squares

* One 3 1/2" squares

From Colour 2 (Orange)

* Four 3" squares

* One 3 1/2" square.

Right. Lets deal with the cross-over squares first (the woven ones). I'm sure these have a proper name, but I'm going to call them cross-over squares cos that's what they are in this block.

1. Take your 3.5" squares (two background and one of each colour). Pair a coloured square with a background square, and draw a diagonal line from one corner to the other on both the background squares. 

2. Sew along both sides of the line, 1/4" away from the line. 

3. Cut along this line, creating two half-square triangles from each of your pairs (total of four HSTs)

4. Press your seams open (or to the side, I prefer open)

5. Trim your HSTs to 3" squares.

You should now have four HST squares - two surf/ash and two orange/ash. 

6. Pair each of your surf/ash squares with an Orange 3" square, and pair each of your orange/ash squares with a Surf 3" square. 

7. Draw a line diagonally through each of the solid 3" squares (ie two orange and two surf). When you pair these with it's HST partner, make sure the drawn line runs PERPENDICULAR to the HST line (see below).

8. Again, sew either side of the line, 1/4" away (as per #2) and cut along the line. 

9. Press your seams open. You'll end up with eight squares (two pairs of each of those below). You will only need to use the two like that at the top left, and the bottom right. 

10. We'll be trimming these to 2.5" squares. First, line up the 45 degree line on your ruler with the long diagonal seam on your block, and trim off the side. 

Then turn your square 90 degrees to the right, and line up the 45 degree line with the short diagonal seam, and the 2.5" line along the bottom of the square. Trim this side.

Continue turning your square and trimming until you have a 2.5" crossover square. Repeat for the remaining three crossover squares.

Right, now the tricky stuff is done, we can make the other HSTs. 

11. Pair your remaining 3" squares as per the photo. Follow steps 1-4 and make a total of eight HSTs. 

12. Trim them to 2.5" squares.

All the preparatory work is done now. So you can lay out your HSTs, background 2.5" squares and crossovers like so:

13. Sew the squares in each row together:

14. Sew your rows together, and you're done! Please ignore my awful points - I promise not to leave these things to the last minute again! UPDATE: this is bugging me so much, I'm going to rip it apart and resew it together. Better block to come (hopefully!) :o) 

I hope you enjoyed my tutorial! Thanks again to Jane for inviting me to design a block :o)

xx Jess

Fugly Fabric Party

The lovely Lucy at Charm About You is hosting another Fugly Fabric Party, and I have a little bundle of not-so-fugly fabric up for grabs.

My little bundle includes a FQ of each of the top prints - all from Anna Maria Horner's Innocent Crush collection. Also included is a 13" x width of fabric strip of Cathedral Windows from her Good Folks range. 

This giveaway is open to anybody - simply leave a comment on this post and you're in the running to win! I'll draw a random winner next Tuesday 15th May.

If you haven't already entered, I also have a current giveaway (ending Saturday 12-05-12) sponsored by the Intrepid Thread - so pop over and enter that too if you're keen :)

xx Jess

Rhapsodia Giveaway from The Intrepid Thread

This week was a bit of a bloggy celebration week for me. 200 followers (yay!) and I wrote my 100th blog post earlier in the week (yay again!) Plus I'm still kind of excited about my Fat Quarterly tutorial :o)

So to help me celebrate, the lovely Julie from The Intrepid Thread has offered a fantastic give away. If you don't know The Intrepid Thread, you can find Julie either on Etsy  or in her online shop. She carries a fantastic range of up-to-the-minute designer quilting fabric and her customer service is brilliant.

 So, to the giveaway! Julie has very generously offered a bundle of 10 fat quarters of the just-released Rhapsodia collection from Art Gallery Fabrics! Sigh. I wish I could win these, they are just gorgeous.

To enter the giveaway:


Simply comment on this blog post and you're in the running to win! If you feel like it, you could let me know what you'd make with this bundle of gorgeousness :o)


Optional extra entries:
* Follow The Intrepid Thread blog and leave me a comment saying you do. 
* Follow my blog, and leave me a comment saying you do.


How easy is that! I'll leave the competition open until next Saturday 12th May at 8pm Australian EST, at which time I'll close the comments and draw a random winner.

Update: Comments have how been closed!

Good luck!
xx Jess

Fresh Sewing Day - May

When I started writing this post I was thinking I pretty much had nothing to show for April. But I do have a few bits and pieces to show for this month - there's just a bit of behind the scenes stuff (like a ridiculous number of curved pieces cut and partially sewn for my Retro Flowers quilt and an almost finished iPad case) that happened too.

The first week or so of April was taken up making my sushi quilt (pattern testing for the extremely talented Sonja of Artisania). Then I had a mojo failure for a while, and regained a bit of momentum - well, enough to get my rainbow trail mini finished (finally!!) and to quilt my Outfoxed on the High Seas quilt. Since then I've been madly cutting my fabrics for the Retro Flowers QAL and I've stitched up one flower (plus a few flowers worth of curves). My other to-do-firsts for April didn't even get a look in unfortunately, but they are still on the back burner somewhere...

So my to-do-first list for May:
1. Retro Flowers/My Precious QAL - combined into one quilt - such a cunning plan ;o)
2. Designer challenge for Fat Quarterly (by next week, eeek! Still no inspiration for this one!)
3. Design a block for the Desperate Housewives QAL - really need to do this soon (like by next week)
4. Zakka Style sew along projects - if my book ever arrives!

This is probably enough for May - I've decided to do my Retro Flowers 5x5 instead of 4x4, with a wider border (or possibly even a couple of borders), so we can use it on our bed. I don't think it'll be a full queen sized quilt, but I'm hoping it will finish at about 80" square. At the rate I'm going with getting it sewn, I'm thinking it will take all month.

I'm linking up to Fresh Sewing Day at Lily's Quilts.

xx Jess