A Prickle of Hedgehogs

When my kids were little we used to play a game whilst they were in the bath. I would quiz them on the name of animal young and collective nouns. It must have stuck in the memory of my youngest as he bought me a print for my birthday last year with many animal collective nouns on it.

When I started making this quilt for Siblings Together, I looked to see what the collective noun for hedgehogs was, and it said a prickle!! Now, I didn't really believe this so I checked it out, and as far as I can see it's true. There is an alternative, which is an array, but I'm going to stick with a prickle. It makes me smile!

So my prickle of hedgehogs is complete. There are 12 of them and I had enough scraps of the fabric left to make a co-ordinating border. I think it adds a nice finishing touch. 

I pin basted it yesterday.

Those poor little hedgehogs. I felt bad putting pins into their faces!

So now it's the quilting. I'm torn between haphazard elongated wavy lines running from top to bottom and a tight zig zag line using one of the decorative stitches on my machine. The second option would be a lot slower, but its the one I'm leaning towards. I'm hoping to test them both out in the next day or so before I finally decide.

The pattern is by Elizabeth Hartman and you can buy it here

We are hoping to get 100 quilts for Siblings Together before the summer camps start this year so that they can be given out to the children as a reminder of their time spent with their siblings. As you can see from the "Quiltometer" in my side bar we are a quarter of the way there! 

If you would like to know more about the charity or to help in any way, please take a look at this post by Mary Emmens

Linking up with Let's Bee Social and Work in Progress Wednesday

Marcie's Maze Quilt Pattern and a Giveaway

Ugh! What a miserably wet weekend we had! There was an upside to that however.... I snuggled up on the sofa for two whole days solid, calculator to one side of me, mug of tea to the other, laptop where it's designed to be (on my lap!!) and wrote up the pattern for the quilt I've just finished.
Do you like the name I've given it?
There's no special reason for it, other than the pattern is designed like a maze and I liked Marcie because of the alliteration - I don't know any Marcies.
Now writing up a pattern is a long job and I can usually only do it in about 2 hour stints, but this weekend I worked continuously - well it was too cold and wet to do anything else!!
I had written copious notes and taken lots of stage by stage photographs as I made the quilt, so it was  a case of just sticking with it and checking and re-checking the maths, adjusting the photos in Photoshop and getting the layout as good and easy to read as I could.
The quilt I made was a lap quilt, but I've included instructions for 6 sizes from Baby to King. The first three sizes use just one jelly roll, the twin and queen use two and the king size needs 3 jelly rolls.
The pattern is for sale in both my Etsy and Craftsy shops and there is also a link in the blog sidebar.

But as we all need something to cheer us up today (I'm sure this wet weather stretches from coast to coast here in the UK) I'm offering this pattern as a giveaway to one lucky winner!
There are no hoops to jump through, just leave a comment below saying how you follow my blog, to be in with a chance to win a PDF copy of this pattern. If you are a no reply blogger, be sure to leave an email address where I can send it to if you win.
The giveaway is open to all followers, wherever you live in the world, and even if you  happen to have sunny weather right now (just don't rub it in by telling me you have!)
The giveaway closes at Midnight GMT on Thursday October.
Good luck!!
Julie

A Quilt Finish!

Yay! I have another quilt finish! This one grew from an idea I had whilst making this strip for the Strip Sewing Bee that I'm part of. 

The blocks were fun to make, but there was always the concern in the back of my mind that if I wasn't 100% accurate they wouldn't match up very easily. So I made the blocks using 2 charm packs from the same line, trimmed them and sashed them so that took all the worries about lack of accuracy away. 

I love the contrast of the grey sashing. I think it's Kona Mid Grey.

Crawling about on the floor, pin basting the sandwich was NOT fun in the 30 degrees heat we have at the moment. It became my own personal hot yoga studio!!

But sitting in the shade, hand sewing the back of the binding was sheer delight!

It will serve as a quilt in the guest bedroom until my Swoon is finished.

Quilt back is organic cotton by Nancy Mims from the Free to Grow line. It's no longer available unfortunately. I've had mine a good while and it was a great match for this quiilt.

The binding is also organic - just a solid aqua.

I've written up the pattern, and added it to my Craftsy store

Details: Used:  2 charm packs (Honey Honey by Moda), Kona snow for background and cornerstones,  

              Kona mid-grey for sashing.

              Quilted with straight line quilting 1/4" away from either side of the sashing

              and each diagonal seam line.

              Finished size: 57" x 66"

Garden Trellis Quilt

 

It's been such a productive weekend!

And I mean in more ways than one. I've enjoyed the sunshine of the weekend to the full, and spend a lot of time gardening. Everywhere looks spick and span and I'm busy harvesting tomatoes, cucumbers,beans and courgettes (zucchini? in the US), but I've also aced my quilting target.

I thought I was going to be showing you this as a work in progress, but I've finished it!

 

 

I wanted to design an easy to make quilt for beginners that wasn't too busy, was modern and would complement any decor. I was a little concerned as I got part way through that it was going to be too "white", but I'm truly pleased with the final result. I could easily see this with a light grey or taupe background though, or even made entirely of solids with the darker fabric as the background and perhaps white for the chain, I used some remaining strips for the binding....

 

.....and I'm so pleased that I did! I didn't want to introduce another print, or prioritise one colour over another.

 

 

I quilted it with diagonal lines which I marked on with a ruler and Hera marker

This is such an easy tool to use, and it's so nice that there are no lines to wash out at the end of the quilting. I do find that if I've handled the quilt a lot (I rotate through 90 degrees at the end of every row of quilting) the lines are getting a little faint towards the end of the task, but it is no problem to lay the quilt flat again and re-mark them.

This quilt will make a great play mat when the youngest members of the family come to visit.

The pattern is available in my Etsy store. Instructions are given for 5 sizes from Baby to King.

Let's hope the rest of the week is as productive, and enjoyable!

 

Easy Four Patch Baby quilt

Hi! today, I'm going to share with you the baby quilt that I made and then sat in the sun and quilted last week (the one and only week of summer that we've had here in the UK this year! My fabric choice is quite an unusual one. It's a far cry from the latest fabrics appearing on the shelves of the local quilt stores, but the fabrics appealed to me for several reasons:
I liked their simplicity, which seemed in keeping with a gift for a newborn.
They are organic cottons, and I'm a huge fan of organic anything, but cotton in particular - a massive amount of chemical goes into the production of standard cotton fabric.
Last, but not least - I had the fabric in my stash already!

The pattern is a very easy one - ideal for a beginner, and I've put together a tutorial, which you can download as a PDF.Just go to the tabs on my home page, select Quilt Patterns and you will find it.

The finished quilt measures approximately 36"x44" (92x112cm), but it would be very simple to make it larger if you needed. It uses Jelly Roll strips or yardage or scrap pieces, whichever you prefer.
I love adding a little hand stitching to quilts - and by that I do mean a little - I don't think I would ever hand quilt a whole quilt, but I do enjoy adding some naive style quilting in places. In this instance, I machine quilted around the four patch blocks and hand quilted the solid white blocks.

I used a Perle cotton No 8 which stands out nicely against the solid white. I chose my backing fabric  so that the hand stitching wouldn't stand out too much against it. I find it impossible to get the stitches even on both the front and the back of the quilt, so I concentrate on what they look like on the front and don't worry about what they look like on the back.

I bound the quilt with simple brown spotty fabric (this one isn't organic unfortunately).

I think it provides a nice contrast to the blues, and I happen to love blue-brown combo, so it was an easy choice.

The pdf pattern gives you all the fabric requirements and instructions, along with lots of photos to guide you if you are a new quilter.

It also gives detailed instructions on how to do the hand quilting.

I hope you find it useful.

Till next week......... Julie