Balloons and Bunnies part 2

Hafsa's quilt is made up from the same line of fabrics, just in a different colour way. Lilacs and oranges and reds. She chose a different pattern for her quilt too. Last week I finished cutting the white sashing that goes between all these pretty fabrics. So soon there will be actual SEWING being done around here....

Balloons and Bunnies

Back to our little home after all our travels, and now it's time to get back into those lovely "domestic arts" that I love so much. Today was a cool and cloudy day, and so I took the opportunity to catch up on my quilting projects. I began two quilts months ago, and today I finally finished cutting the main blocks for Maymuna's. We had a great time putting them up on the "design wall" and arranging them and moving them all about. I think we have settled on the final arrangement so I am happy at last.

And so is she!

Now this just needs sewing! With any luck, the next update on this quilt will be the top being put together! I move back and forth between each quilt so they will be finished at around the same time, so we shift to Hafsa's before any more is done on this project... 

Done!

 With just a little over 48 hours to spare, I have finally finished the baby quilt for Brit and Emre! For all that work I am amazed at how small it is! Probably only 32 x 32 inches - perfect for a crib or spontaneous naps wherever, then later as a stroller blanket - but a whole lot of quilting lines! Phew!

Since I finished the quilting, I needed to remove the excess batting and backing:

Then sew on the binding:

We had a little photo session with it today, as we will soon be parting with it:

The quilting lines that follow the zig zag through the neutral pieces is really what makes me happy about this quilt. These sewing lines are not *perfect* or *straight* a lot of the time, but the overall effect seems to overshadow those little faults and the back really shows off the quilting. I think I like it as much as the front:

I hope it will be well used and well loved by its little recipient :-) It was so much fun to make!

Sew sew sew!

Quilts for the girls

Of course while doing all these other projects, I have been waiting and planning for quilts for each of my girls. I wanted to make something really special for them, a tribute or homage of sorts to their childhood, and this fabric by Sarah Jane is the perfect thing.

I picked the "Meadow" palette for Hafsa. It is very playful and has lots of orange and lilac (though it looks pink here):

Maymuna's fabric is aqua and red and pink:

I didn't buy all the fabrics in each line, but I got hopefully just enough to make a nice little quilt each. I love the whimsy in this collection - the pinwheels, hopscotch, balloons, flowers, plaid and polka dots! I can't wait to get started on them! You see the fabric better and bigger by clicking on those images or on the website here.

Sneak Peak: next quilt

Our visit to Istanbul this summer (inshallah) is made WILDLY more possible (and affordable) by friends of Ozayr's there who offered to let us stay in their apartment for the duration of our trip. Emre is Turkish and Brit is Minnesotan, and they met there on one of Ozayr's study abroad May-term trips. They got married last year and are expecting their first baby this fall. I really wanted to make something special for them because it's such a special time in their lives, and it is very very wonderful for us to have this opportunity to hang out in Istanbul with such ease.

I saw this quilt online and fell in love with its subtle zig zag pattern.

from Red Pepper Quilts

I have been looking for an excuse to purchase this particular line of fabrics by Lotta Jansdotter - which are cute, not gender-specific and sufficiently "cool" for the teeny architectural crowd. Lucky me, I have a ton left over after cutting the pieces.

I have to move MUCH faster on this project than the one before, I have less than a month to complete it. I am a little faster now though - and I chose a much smaller size! A smart move, I think....

Here is my initial pattern mock-up (in which the pink fabrics bit the dust, they didn't fit with the look I was going for).

You can (hopefully) see that the mixed neutral pieces make a zig zag pattern along side the patterned ones, but the look is subtle. The quilting lines on the original follow the zig zag to define it a little better - I hope that I can create the same effect. The quilt is aiming to be about 32 inches square (about half the size of my first quilt).

Right now the pieces are all divided up into the different blocks, ready to be pieced!

I am very excited to get to work on this quilt! I hope it's the perfect gift. :-)

Quilt #2

That was fast!

Ha! No... This project was a group effort that began a month or two ago - a quilt even more special than my own, because we made it for a friend going through hard times. We divided up the blocks among 5 or 6 of us, then got together to attach them, and add the border. We sent it away to be quilted because it's huge and we wanted our gift to be ready fast! The final touch is the hand stitched border around the edge...

Beautiful! It's flannel, so it's nice and soft for her, and she loves red. With every stitch we pray that her cure is complete and her recovery is quick. :-)

First Quilt

Over a year ago, my brother and sister in-law got me a sewing machine. Somehow in their crafty brains, they had stored the information - that must have been mentioned somewhere, at some time - that I had always wanted to sew, and in particular I have always wanted to quilt. I actually had quilting books and fabric in the house before I even had a machine! I just love BLANKETS in general. We have never really put away the children's favourite baby blankets, and they come out on rainy days, sick days, or any day that feels particularly cuddly. :-)

Within a month or two of having the machine, a good friend of mine here was beginning on HER first quilt, and so we embarked on the journey together. She finished 8 or 9 months before me, but in typical fashion, I undertook a project much too ambitious for my skill level. It has taken a loooong time, but I learned a lot along the way. Kudos to the internet, tutorials and youtube videos. I basically taught myself what I needed to know every step of the way, with help from Andrea and my quilting friend Tina.

So in spring of last year I was having lots of fun picking out fabric and deciding on a pattern for the quilt. I decided on a simple square patchwork quilt, 8 blocks by 8 blocks. It was not meant for a bed covering, but more of a lap quilt, for at least 3 laps ;-) This fabric was the inspiration for the whole quilt:

It has all the colours that I love - various shades of blue and purple, with pinks and green as well. Since this quilt was entirely for me, I embraced the palate and began to build a serious fabric stash. Ozayr was extremely helpful, because as much as I love colour and respond to colours, I am not that great at putting them together.

Then I set to work cutting my 8 inch by 8 inch squares and figuring out how to put them together. (Ozayr's hint: Squint!)

Once I had the basic configuration figured out, it was time to piece them together so that I had a quilt top. I did this row by row, then sewed the rows together.

Then I had to assemble the quilt "sandwich" - the top, the batting and the backing fabric. This took place on my living room floor...

Then it all needed to be pinned together. I think there were over 200 safety pins in all. I ran out at one point and had to run to Byerly's at 11 o'clock at night to get more. Because you just can't leave your whole living room floor covered in quilt for very long when you have kids. :-)

 

Next came the most arduous part, which probably took me from September of last year until just a few weeks ago. First I sewed along the grid lines of the quilt, so every square was quilted along each edge. And then the pattern called for free motion quilting INSIDE of each square - of which I had 64. I had never tried to free motion quilt before, where you use a darning foot on your machine and you can move the quilt around freely (not just forwards and backwards) to make designs that *can be* very creative. You can see some examples here and here. This technique is pretty daunting because the stitch length and everything is determined by how quickly and deftly you are moving the quilt around. If you stop moving the quilt for a second, you've just put 3 stitches in the exact same spot. If you move too quickly, your stitches are too long. In general, my stitches were never even or consistent, especially since I only ever quilted a block or two at a time. But it does lend itself to a lot of creativity and I tried to make every block different. Some I outlined the design on the fabric to make it stand out more...

and on others I tried to add some contrast to the pattern...

I did try my hand at traditional stipling, but I found it hard to keep the design even across the whole square, even if it was only 8x8!

Now that it's done, you can see the variety on the back of the quilt, though it's only really noticeable in certain light...

The part I've been working on for the last month or so has been the binding. I really didn't want to screw up the quilt on the very last stage, so I did  A LOT of practice binding on scraps of quilt. In the end too, I ended up changing my binding fabric from a matching floral to this striped fabric:

So just yesterday I tacked on the binding and machine sewed it:

Traditionally the binding is put on by hand, but honestly I just don't have that kind of time! If you hand-sew it properly you can hide the stitches along the edge of the binding, but honestly I don't mind the way it turned out, it might be one of my favourite parts of the quilt now that it's done.

So there you go! The loooooong story of my first quilt. The next few projects are already planned and the fabric is bought - let's hope it doesn't take nearly as long this time!!!!! :-)

Summer skirts

I accidentally bought too much of this light blue striped cotton fabric for my quilt, and thought it would be the perfect summer skirt material for the girls. I found this adorable pattern at MADE, and voila!

The piping on Hafsa's is a red and white polka dot that I made from the Children At Play collection.





Maymuna's is the slightly more sophisticated floral from Anna Maria Horner's Crush.