I made the hand-in time!

Last minute - as usual! I was manning one of the hand-in desks and sewing a velcro strip on the back of my quilt at the same time. I ended up being on the busiest desk too. I can tell you that in the amateur wallhangings section alone in Calico Christmas this year there are 60 quilts! Fortunately some of the other ladies wrote some of the receipts for me, one lady even did a bit of my sewing when I was inundated with quilts. What a lovely bunch of people!

Anyway, with all the last minute work, I never took a photo of the finished quilt! Sorry to those of you who were eagerly awaiting the unveiling (and thank you for the lovely comments). I didn't do this on purpose - honest! I can show you a couple of pieces joined together. The rest will have to wait until I can photograph the quilt in the show.
 

Details of the the quilt show here.

Other news, Leah has posted the winners of the Transformation Challenge. My little quilt wasn't a winner but I can see why. Mine was very different to the other quilts and would have stuck out like a sore thumb. I didn't think of that when I designed it. Never mind, it means I get it back - and one of Leah's books too. I'm happy about that.

Kowhaiwhai Transformations finished

Ok, I've been a bit slack recently and it's taken me until today to finally finish the binding on this. I'll blame Melanie, my daughter. She's been back in New Zealand for part of her summer holidays so we've been busy catching up. All of the catching up has caught up with me! I fallen asleep every afternoon this week.

Anyway, it's done now and will be off to North Carolina tomorrow.  I see that Hurricane Irene looks like it's going to leave them alone. Here's a close-up view of the quilting. It almost looks like trapunto!

Update: I had just checked out a map of the path of Hurricane Irene when I posted this. News reporting being as it is, I hadn't heard about Irene until it threatened the US coast. I wondered if my sister had had any trouble with it but reckoned that no news is good news. When I checked the map it looked like it had been a tropical storm over most of the Caribbean, picked up speed as it headed to Florida but was starting to lose ferocity and head out to the mid Atlantic. Just as well I'm a maths teacher and not a meteorologist because I got it wrong! Mind you, so did Michael Fish in 1987!

Transformation challenge - finalist!!

I came home to some lovely news yesterday. My little quilt is a finalist in this challenge. I have finished it... almost! One last bit of sewing on the binding to do and then I'll take a final photo before sending it off. But I have to go to work first, which is a real bummer because I want to have a look at all the lovely websites of the other finalists! Check them out. http://freemotionquilting.blogspot.com/2011/08/transformation-challenge-finalists.html

Transformation challenge part 4

I've been busy this evening. I've done half of it. These are the designs I've used.
spiral petals
loopy paisley
leaf filler
coffee beans

Transformation challenge part 3

I've fussed about trying to get this design as uniform and symmetrical as I could. Let's just pretend I meant to make it more organic!


I drew the design on to freezer paper and ironed it the quilt back. Then I free-motion quilted on the lines, trying to fix up mistakes as I went.

This is the front of the quilt. Now I have to try to remove all the freezer paper, ready to quilt in the spaces. I also have a little bit of unpicking to do!

Transformation challenge part 2

My second experiment:
I tried a different fabric. That white fabric feels like a poly/cotton but it isn't. A softer cotton is easier to quilt.
The hearts were an experiment with the bobbin and feed dogs. The first group is feed dogs up and bobbin thread just through the tension clip in the bobbin case. The second group is feed dogs down. Then for the next group I threaded the bobbin thread through the eye in the bobbin case as well as the tension thingy.  Bernina machines (and some others) have an eye on the bobbin case. The first six hearts are done with the feed dogs down and then I put them back up. I think the quilting is smoother on the third group.



This is another idea that I was exploring. It's an untied celtic knot!


And this is just a doodle - but it was fun to do it.

Transformation contest - part 1

I've had a really boring week making new cushions for my couch. I made the first one too tight and had to remake it. So now I don't have enough fabric. On top of that, when I worked out how much fabric I needed, I didn't take the pattern of the fabric into account and it is directional (nap, as seamstresses would say) and so I've had to cut out the cushion covers with a lot of wastage. I hate taking up hems, mending zips and making functional items. I would much rather be sewing little scraps of fabric together!

So, after finishing just one cushion, here's my reward. I've been working on an entry for a contest.

The theme is 'Transformation'. Of course, being a maths teacher, that means geometry to me. Reflection, rotation and translation. When I teach transformations, I always do a lesson where I get the students to draw kowhaiwhai designs and identify the transformations that they have used, perhaps last period on Friday or some time when I don't want to think. They always enjoy it and I get a break! I do love the designs though. In fact, kowhaiwhai designs have been my inspiration for a previous quilt.  See this post on the design of Koru Gecko.

Scribbles in my sketchbook

The size of the contest quilt is only 9 by 12 inches. I thought that the small format made it difficult to make a design out of fabric, even using the method I've used for my recent quilts. The focus has to be on the quilting so I decided that quilting would be the only colour in this quilt. I needed to see how quilting would fit into small spaces so this sketch is full size.


The quilting designs look cool in pencil. Can I do the same thing in thread?

Ok, so some of it needs a bit of work but I think the idea is coming together.

I was testing a couple of things in this sample. Firstly, how densely does it have to be quilted for the colour to look good. Answer, at least a bit more tightly than the white of the design.  Looking at the top black bit, there is one section where I made the strands a little further apart, just to try to fill the space a bit quicker. I think there is too much white showing and it is competing with the design.  The quilting has to be as dense as the pebbles otherwise the white design doesn't pop out. The red coffee beans work because although the coffee beans are big, the white space is broken up with the wiggly line through the coffee bean.

The second thing I wanted to test was a good way to stay in the lines.  Now, it didn't help that I just drew this design freehand with an erasable marker that is just about dead! My first idea was to quilt the lines with a wash-away thread and then quilt with colour up to the lines. I did the red border first.  As you can see, I went over the lines and my design was eaten up by the quilting. Then I tried just marking the line with pen and quilting up to it. A felt pen mark is about 2mm thick and not precise enough for such a small scale quilt.  Also, sometimes I forgot to fill in the line so my white design is bleeding out into the quilted space. Then I did the black border and decide to simplify the design at the same time.  A bit better result. The last part was the main design in black.  This time I went around my felt pen mark carefully with one line of black thread first.  I think that's the way to go. I found it easier to keep the quilting in the space.

So now I need to draw my design properly and think about how to get it on to the fabric. The other problem I foresee is that the finished piece has to be exactly 9"x12" and I have no idea how much the quilting is going to draw it in. I should have measured my sample before I started.  Look at all the lovely maths that would involve!