Blogger's Quilt Festival - Sunshine Through the Rain

I absolutely love Amy's biannual Blogger's Quilt Festival - looking through all the entries is always inspiring, and I love adding new blogs to my reader. I don't have anything brand new this time around, but I've had fun looking through my finishes since the last festival and deciding which two to choose. If you're popping in for the festival, welcome to my blog!

I couldn't not pick this little quilt for one of my entries - I'm still a little sad that it's finished, it really was such a joy to make. So I'm entering Sunshine Through the Rain in the original quilt category. I live in Tasmania, the little island to the south of mainland Australia - and in winter we have a lot of grey, rainy days that seem to go on forever. I get really grumpy and down in this kind of weather, so I made this as a gentle reminder to myself to try to stay positive regardless of what is going on outside my window. Winter seems to have arrived early this year, so it's been quite a therapeutic quilt already :o)

You can read all about the construction of this quilt here. I appliqued the rain drops using needle turn applique, and then improv-pieced the quilt top using a range of grey and white light value prints. It is densely matchstick quilted using a variegated grey Aurifil 40wt thread for the most part, with a light yellow thread around the sun. The dense quilting has made the raindrops and sun rays pop beautifully from the quilt top, and feels incredible.

Quilt stats:
Techniques: Needle turn applique, improvisational piecing, matchstick quilting.
Size: 30" x 36"
Quilted: using FMQ matchstick quilting on my Bernina 440QE, using Aurifil 40 threads.
Design: Improvisationally designed (ie I made it up as I went along!)

I hope you enjoy the rest of the festival!

xx Jess

SMS Giveaway Day - Millefiori by Sarah Fielke

For all of you stopping by for Sew Mama Sew's Giveaway Day, welcome to my little corner of the blogosphere! My name is Jess, and I love sharing my quilts and process here on my blog. I am a mum of three little people and live in Tasmania, Australia. These are a few of my most recent finishes:

I have a gorgeous bundle of fabric on offer for this giveaway - six fat quarters of Millefiori by Sarah Fielke. If you've never seen thiss fabric before, it is probably because it was only available in Spotlight stores in Australia and New Zealand - so it is a great chance for those of you who live elsewhere in the world to get your hands on some! 

This giveaway is open internationally, and will be open until 12pm on Saturday 17th May (which is around about 5pm PST on 16th May). 

To enter:

Please just leave a comment letting me know what you'd make with these fabrics. My followers (new and old) get a second entry - just leave a second comment letting me know how you follow!

If you're a no-reply commenter, PLEASE leave your email address in your comment. If I can't contact you, I will have to choose another winner.

Mr Random will choose a winner once the giveaway has closed, and I will announce the winner on this post. 

Giveaway is closed! The winner is comment #161, Farm Quilter. Congratulations, I'm sending you an email now :o)

Good luck!

xx Jess

Block Flower Quilt {Finished and Featured!}

I got a bit of a surprise yesterday when I was reading the latest issue of Quilters Companion magazine - my Block Flower quilt is in this month's issue #67 (obviously I realised it would be in the magazine at some stage, I just didn't realise it was in this issue.) So I can finally show you the quilt I was working on last November/December.

I took her off to our Botanical Gardens this morning for a photo shoot. When Hobart does autumn well, it does it in spectacular style. It has been a crisp, cold morning, but gloriously sunny - a beautiful morning to walk around the Gardens with quilt in tow. I did get a few strange looks while I was taking these photos ;o)

I used some of my favorite fabrics in this quilt (Good Folks and Garden Party by Anna Maria Horner, Echo by Lotta Jansdotter, Briar Rose by Heather Ross, and lots of Madrona Road by Violet Craft). It is a very spring-time palette of deep pinks, oranges, and reds with a few pops of charcoal grey.

The blocks are simple in design, but a perfect choice to use for larger scale prints.

I am really proud of what I did with the quilting on this quilt. I wanted to create an interesting secondary design with the quilting, and I think I achieved that. I used Aurifil 50wt in Dove grey - someone described this recently as a chameleon thread and it is such a good description. It has become my go-to thread for quilting low volume (light value) fabric, as it seems to blend beautifully into these fabrics, regardless of whether they are cream, white or grey based.

I did use my regular quilting ruler and a Hera marker to mark the long straight lines on the quilt top, but other than that it is all done by eye. I've used a combination of my favorite go-to swirls and pebbles, very dense matchstick quilting (these lines are less than 1/8" apart) and some other straight-line designs in and around the blocks. I loved quilting this one - although it did take a very long time (around 30-40 hours I think.) Cue close up shots of the quilting ;o)

Quilt Stats:
* Size - 80" square
* Fabric - I used a range of prints (Anna Maria Horner, Violet Craft, Lotta Jansdotter) for the flowers, low volume (light value) prints for the block backgrounds, and Kona medium grey for the sashing and border.
* Quilted - by me on my Bernina 440QE, with Aurifil 50wt light grey (Dove) thread

I will be looking for some pattern testers for this quilt pattern, so if anyone is interested please let me know. I have enough testers this time around (thankyou!) but if you'd be interested in testing patterns for me later in the year, please let me know. Several of you were no-reply bloggers, so if you don't hear back from me, it's because I can't reply. I've also decided to start thinking about making some short videos of how I quilt and putting them on You Tube. My question is, what would you guys like to see?

Linking up with Crazy Mom Quilts!

xx Jess

Decipher Your Quilt - a couple of clarifications

Today Leanne of She Can Quilt and I will be taking a slight detour from our scheduled Decipher Your Quilt posts to clarify a few points that we have covered in the series so far. I have had a few really great, thought-provoking comments left on some of my DYQ posts in the last week, so we've decided to explain these points further.

I am by no means an expert on quilt blocks, but I do have a love of maths and geometry, and it is this passion that inspired this series. Our aim is to help you understand how to identify what type of grid various quilt blocks are based on, and then be able to figure out the maths behind the block; this is this idea that's forefront in my mind when writing my DYQ posts. 

UNEVEN GRID TYPES:

One point that I'd like to clarify is in regards to uneven grid types. When I gave the 5-patch Shoofly block as an example of a 25 patch block, it was pointed out to me that in Barbara Brackman's Encyclopedia of Quilt Blocks this is regarded as an uneven 9 patch block.

If you look at the geometry of the block, it can indeed be considered to be an uneven 9 patch block (where the five centre patches are smaller than the four outer patches). However, it is also considered a 25 patch block (in other quilt block books and EQ7 for example) because it is possible to superimpose a 5x5 grid on this block.  

As will all things in life, quilting does include some 'grey areas', and there is no right or wrong answer here - this block (and many others) can be considered either a 25 patch block OR an uneven 9 patch. The aim of our series is to show you how to work out what type of grid different quilt blocks are based on, and to then be able to figure out the maths involved. To me, it makes more sense to think of this block as a 25 patch to then be able to figure out what size the patches would need to be for a given sized finished block. But, if you are more comfortable thinking of it as an uneven 9 patch, and can get your head around the maths involved, there is no reason why you shouldn't think of it in these terms. 

BLOCK CONSTRUCTION VS BLOCK TYPE:

My post on identifying 16 patch blocks has also raised some excellent points. It was pointed out that the following three blocks (Crown of Thorns, Temple Court and Another Star) are constructed as 9 patch blocks, so how can they be called 16 patch blocks?

The simple answer is that how you put a block together does not necessarily relate to what type of grid that block is based on. As I explained in my post, these blocks are all considered to be 16 patch blocks because their symmetry and geometry is based on a 4x4 grid - they can all be divided into 16 equal sized squares. If you wanted to draft these blocks and figure out the maths behind them it would be critical to consider them as 16 patch blocks. For example, this is the Crown of Thorns block, with a 4x4 grid superimposed over it.

You can see that the underlying grid of this block is a 4x4 grid, which would be needed to figure out the size of each of the patches in the block. But, when you went to piece these blocks, they would indeed be constructed as a 9 patch (in fact, an uneven 9 patch), with three units across by three units down. It would make sense to piece the centre part of the block as an on-point square rather than four half square triangles, and to construct the four rectangular units as shown in the first image, rather than dividing them down the centre as in the image showing the grid. The important point here is that when figuring out how to make those units, you would need to be using a 4x4 grid, regardless of what method you wanted to use to put them together. 

I hope this helps clarify these things - and thanks so much to those of you have been reading these posts, thinking about them and asking questions. That is why we are running this series :o) As always, if you do have any questions about anything we have covered so far, please leave a comment or send me an email and I will answer as best I can :o)

We will be taking a short break from our Decipher Your Quilt posts, and will be back on the 22nd of May talking about odd-ball blocks.

xx Jess

Sunshine through the rain {Umbrella Prints Trimmings Challenge}

If you follow me on Instagram, you will have noticed I've been working a bit obsessively on this quilt since Wednesday - and I'm extremely pleased to say I finished up the binding and last few bits of applique last night. I know I say this about almost every quilt I make, but this is quite seriously my favorite quilt I have ever made. I loved every single minute of putting it together and I'm absolutely delighted with how it turned out. The picture I had in my head has come together exactly as I'd hoped it would.

My initial idea for this mini was inspired by the blue trimmings packet I ordered from Umbrella Prints when they announced the 2014 trimmings challenge a few weeks ago. I ordered blue with the vague idea of raindrops in mind, and when they arrived they were absolutely perfect. To make the raindrops, I drew freehand tear drop shapes on each of the trimmings, sizing the raindrops so that they would use up as much of the trimmings as possible. I then needle turn appliqued them onto a variety of pale grey and white prints - a process I'm falling deeper in love with each time I do it.

Once I had the applique done, I put them all up on my design wall and started playing. I decided to try improv piecing a sun using very pale yellow prints (so it is more a suggestion of sunshine on a rainy day than a really bright and bold sun). I'm very affected by the weather and tend to get a bit down in the dumps when we have day after day of overcast gloomy weather. As we move deeper into autumn and winter in Tasmania, and we are having a lot of overcast rainy days, I wanted this mini to be a gentle reminder to myself to focus on the positive things in my life rather than get weighed down by what's going on outside my window.

There were a few very hairy moments piecing the sun part of the quilt - I ended up needing to do some improv y-seams (NOT fun) and one of the seams is actually an exposed seam on top of the fabric - but now it's quilted you can't actually see it so it's all good. I then improv pieced the raindrop blocks together, log cabin style. Putting all the pieces together was like doing a puzzle, and I included the smaller, heavier weight Umbrella Prints trimming at this stage (they would have been too difficult to needleturn due to the combination of size and weight.)

Once the quilt top was pieced, I needle turn appliqued the partial circle for the sun in the top corner. I pondered whether to hand quilt this one - but in the end I went with my gut and decided to matchstick quilt it, using free motion quilting. To me it fits perfectly with the idea of the rest of the quilt - and is quite reminiscent of rain sliding down a window pane. I used Aurifil 40 wt for all the quilting - I used a pale yellow around the sun rays, and then a variegated grey for the rest of the quilting. The texture is sublime - and really made those raindrops and sun rays pop.

 A few people have commented how quickly I got the quilting done. Relatively speaking I suppose that's true - it took about 5 hours to quilt as opposed to the usual 20-30 hours I spend quilting most of my quilts. Having said that, it is a pretty small quilt (around 30" x 36") so it wasn't especially quick for a quilt this size. And there is a LOT of thread on this little quilt - I used almost 8 bobbins of 50wt Aurifil.

When I matchstick quilt, I use my free motion foot, and work top to bottom rather than side to side. I started on the one seam I knew ran vertically (just off centre) and tried to keep each of my subsequent lines parallel. I did drift a little bit, but they did essentially stay in line with each other.

We have already had a few family discussion as to where this mini will live - we all absolutely love it, so it will probably hang somewhere in the loungeroom or kitchen so we can all appreciate it :o)

If you're interested in joining in the challenge, entries are open until the end of this month. I can't wait to see what everyone comes up with!

xx Jess

Living the dream

I have just finished reading a wonderful post written by my friend Gemma (aka Pretty Bobbins) on what success means to her in terms of quilting and quilting as a business. It made me start thinking really hard about my own quilting journey, and where I'd like to go with the whole blogging/quilting thing I have going. Honestly I would eventually like to pursue quilting as a full time career, and hopefully bring in enough income to make that possible (between designing patterns, teaching and eventually quilting for other people). At the moment I have one child still at home, and don't work in a paid job aside from teaching quilting a few hours a week (although that will change next year when my youngest starts school and I reenter the workforce) but I still dream of one day being able to do this quilt thing full time. I honestly have no idea whether it will actually eventuate, but I plan on working my butt off to make it happen.

When I started quilting almost three years ago, I had no clue what a massive part of my life it would become. Although I've always dabbled in creative things in the past (mainly cross stitch and sculpture), I have always described myself as a scientist rather than an artist or creative person. But since I have started quilting that perspective has changed dramatically - quilting is my happy place, my way to destress and just focus on making and creating quilts. I would most definitely describe myself as a creative person these days.

One of the biggest changes in me as a person is the self-confidence I have developed through my quilting. I am not a confident person - I am almost painfully shy, and have always had issues with self confidence. I think in part my increased confidence is because of all the wonderful friends I've made in the online quilting world, and the boost I get from positive feedback when I share my quilts. Gemma shared a list of her successes in terms of quilting, and I loved reading her list, so I thought I'd do the same here. This is not meant to be a big 'oh look how awesome I am' post, I really do have issues talking myself up (and like Gemma, this putting this out there makes me incredibly anxious). But when I think of what I've achieved, especially in the last eighteen months, I do feel like I'm succeeding in what I do. Not in terms of making money, but in terms of being happier with where I'm at in my life than ever before. I really am living the dream at the moment. I should also mention that I try really, really hard not to compare myself to other quilters in terms of success - what I consider successful is probably way, way less exciting than the big bloggers out there. It is incredibly difficult NOT to compare myself to others, and it is something I struggle with from time to time, but right now I'm feeling happy with where I'm at, and don't feel the need to measure my success compared to other more accomplished quilters :o)

* Top of the list for me is definitely being published in one of Australia's top quilting magazines - I made four quilts for publication last year, and have had a couple more commissioned in the last week. Also being asked if I would like to be profiled in an upcoming issue was pretty amazing (I was in shock for a good couple of weeks over that one, believe me!)
* Teaching opportunities at my local patchwork shop. Although I was incredibly nervous (and still get incredibly nervous before my classes) I absolutely LOVE doing it. It's definitely something I will continue to pursue, and hopefully I'll eventually get over the nerves.
* Growing my blog, and making friends all over the world through my blogging.
* Having a quilt accepted into a quilt show.
* Amazing feedback from my quilting heroes, and suggestions that I should get a longarm.
* How proud my kids are of my quilts and publications (to the point that they tell people I'm a famous quilter - I am very quick to discount this by the way!)

As far as artistic integrity goes, I don't feel like I've compromised that in anything I've done. I realise I have sponsors on my blog, but they are all shops I truly love and only approached them because of that. My income from blog sponsorship pretty much funds my fabric habit, and allows me to plan to attend events like Quiltcon next year, and the Australian Machine Quilting Festival later this year and actually have a bit of spending money (I'm still relying on the hubs to foot the vast majority of those bills!) - it doesn't help pay the mortgage. When I talk about products I love on my blog, it is because I really believe they are great and am never paid to give my opinion. I make what I want to, when I want to. I'm too honest a person to do anything else.

My five-year plan is to work outside the home and keep up with what I'm doing quilt-wise at the moment, save up money and buy a longarm so that I can quilt my own quilts and quilt for customers. I think I have the ability and talent to do this, mostly because some of my biggest quilty heros have told me in no uncertain terms that they think I can. So between that, teaching and designing and hopefully selling patterns, I still dream that this quilting thing will become a full time job for me :o)

I don't think I've ever talked so much about me on my blog before, and probably won't again ;o) I'm hoping to be back in the next few days with a quilty finish, so regular programming with recommence then :o) I would love to hear what your thoughts are on quilting as a business, and whether I'm alone in this crazy ambition!

xx Jess

Decipher Your Quilt - 25 patch calculations

For today's Decipher Your Quilt post, Leanne of She Can Quilt and I will both be talking about 25 patch blocks - Leanne is showing you how to identify 25 patch blocks and quilts, and I will be discussing the maths behind them.

For today's post, Leanne will be going into a lot more depth about what a 25 patch block is, but to put it very simply a 25 patch block is any block that can be divided into a 5x5 grid of equal sized squares. 

Although they sound a bit intimidating, 25 patch blocks are really common - you might be surprised just how many you have encountered. As always, these are just my thoughts on how to approach 25 patch calculations :o). 

So, what size should my 25 patch be?

Quilters are pretty smart - we like to make things easier for ourselves by choosing a block size that means cutting fabric in whole or half-inch increments, rather than horrible fractions (like 3/8" for example). Not only is it easier to get your head around whole numbers and the maths involved, it seems to be more comfortable to accurately cut fabric - possibly because the whole and half-inch markings on rulers are generally easier to see.

Since a 25-patch block is five squares across by five squares down, it would make sense to choose a finished block size that is divisible by five (ie 5", 10", 15", 20" etc). This will mean dealing with whole numbers, rather than fractions. 

For example, if you chose to make a 10" finished 25 patch block, you could calculate the finished size of each of the squares by calculating 10/5 = 2, a nice round number. This is far easier than choosing a finished block size of, say, 16", where you would be dealing with difficult fractions when cutting fabric, which is far more likely to end up with wonky points and blocks that aren't quite the right size. 
What about seam allowance?

Learning how to add seam allowance to your measurements is one of the big tricks in quilty maths - and it is critical to learn how to do it so you end up with blocks that are the right size. If you don't account for the extra fabric that will end up within the seam allowance, you will be cutting fabric the wrong size and end up with blocks that are not the size you want.

Quilters use a 1/4" seam allowance, so a 1/4" on each side of every piece of fabric will be 'lost' in the seam when you join them to another piece of fabric.

For example, if the desired finished size of a square is 3",

 you need to account for the 1/4" on all four sides that will be taken up in the seam allowance.

 So when cutting fabric for a 3" finished square, you will need to add the seam allowance to all sides ie (1/4" + 3" + 1/4") = 3.5".

So the rule of thumb is to add 0.5" to each finished measurement in the block.

So how do I know what size to cut my fabric for a 25 patch block?

Some 25-patch blocks are a combination of units laid out in a 5x5 grid - for example the 25 patch block

As I mentioned above, to calculate the size of the squares, you simply need to divide the finished block size by 5. So if you were making a 10" finished block, you divide 10 by 5 = 2, and then add 1/2" to find your cutting measurements. So for a 10" finished 25 patch block, you would need to cut your squares at 2.5". 

However, it is quite common to get 25-patch blocks with a layout like this:

Some examples of actual blocks like this are Duck and Ducklings (cutest name ever or what?)

and the 5 patch Shoo Fly.

In each of these blocks, the larger section takes up a 2x2 area on the grid, so when calculating the size of these units, you would need to multiply your finished size block by 2/5. For example, if you were making a 10" finished block, you would calculate 10 x 2/5 = 4, and then add your seam allowance to get an unfinished size of 4 1/2" for those units. 

For the 5 Patch Shoo Fly block, this would simply mean making HSTs and trimming them down to 4.5". 

I hope this has been a helpful post, but if you have any questions please just send me an email or leave a comment and I'll answer as best I can. As always, if you make something using any of our tutorials in the series you can use the hashtag #decipheryourquilt on Instagram, or add it to the Flickr group.