Saturday 22 September 2012

September, time for another quilt methinks!


I have been sewing the back of my liberty cushion which is going well; I found some lovely small pieces of Japanese fabric and have stitched them into stars. As I can hand piece these, they have been occupying my lunch breaks.
The cross stitch is coming along well but not finished yet.

I have been thinking of making another quilt for a while and found the perfect excuse, my little sister had requested one a few months ago and now she has just started university. So I thought I will make her a quilt as a sort of moving away/flatwarming gift! Having thought about it a bit more I have decided to make a quillow from a pattern in a book called 'Love.... quilting' As she is at university in a small room she can have it as a cushion to look nice and brighten up the room and then unfold it into a quilt when she gets cold. Having lived in student halls I know that anything space saving and small is a good idea.

Now the big problem......what fabric do I make it from?! Having looked in my stash I don't really have anything as most of it is small pieces. I wanted something bright and cheery as she likes her bright colours. Not too traditional, floral or pretty as I wanted it to match any room she lived in. While looking online I fell in love with the Trade Winds range from Moda designed by Lily Ashby.
Trade Winds by Lily Ashby, Moda.


This was bright and colourful and looked exotic and luxurious. My favourites were on the third and fourth rows down, I like the jewel like design and Indian inspiration. However when I looked into it a bit more I decided that the patterns may be a bit too large for this design and I would be better off with something with a more repetitive pattern. I started to think that a geometric pattern may be better and instantly give the modern look I was trying to go for.
Then I found Washi by Rashida Coleman-Hale for Timeless Treasures and this intrigued me. I like the triangles and the colours; I started to think if I had that as the background and then solid colours for the quilt blocks that would look fresh and simple. After quite a lot of thinking and browsing the fabrics are as follows:

Fabrics for quillow

Washi natural from M is for Make,
Bright pink, turquoise, grey cotton
Turquoise stars, I was considering this to be the centre of the stars but it wasn’t quite right
Yellow elephants on linen.

The elephant fabric had been considered once and discarded. I got it out again, realised the square shape in the centre of the star block was on its point for this quilt design and then realised that the elephant print looked so much more interesting when it was laid out like this! It was the perfect centre for the star and gave a focal point without overpowering the rest of the design.
Then again.....when I actually sew them they may not work together at all!

I made up a block by hand just to see how it would look, before I cut out the whole quilt. Some stars will have plain blue fabric others blue star fabric.

Practise star.

As you can tell this was all done in the evening as the photos are really poor. In future I should wait until daytime to photograph and hopefully photos will look better.

To see the finished item and post details here