Joy's Quilt

What a difference fabric can make. Joy, the woman with the bright red shoes, made this quilt for one of her grandson's and isn't it absolutely amazing. 

She'd had many plans but wanted to highlight the background fabric and her original plans would have meant a LOT of work and left little space for this fabric to feature. 

She had already made about 40 of the NYBs when she saw the Wedding Quilt layout and thought it would be the way to go and so asked me to design a central circle that could feature and allow her to us my layout. 

Viola not bad ... the quilt I mean. 

Won't her grandson be gobsmacked when he sees this!

Another Failure

Well one thing about tinkering too far is that you end up with a big fat blob!!! 

Can you believe that there is only minor changes between this border and the one I did last week? 

I was so happy as I was drawing this and fixing that and then I did the colour in and blah. All of the life has gone from it. 

Well wedding is only a month away and so this will be another late quilt. Then again PJ said he never thought it would be finished by then. He might not have expected it but at one stage I did.

Yet Another Border

Well the designing continues, thankfully it is only a draw and colour exercise at this stage as this is the best out of about nine borders I have drawn up so far. 

Boy am I glad I did that class with Robbi Eclow as the skills she taught me about designing with Illustrator have been invaluable.

Although I think the edges look great I'm not keen at all on the corners so I suppose it is as they say back to the drawing board.

New Wedding Quilt Border

Well have been working on the border of the wedding quilt again. Must say if nothing else my Illustrator skills have improved :-) it still needs more work but I think I am heading in the right direction.... well I like it and that's a start.

Hmmmmm ... wedding border sewn

Well I have now sewn three 'eggs' for the border of the wedding quilt and must say that I don't like it. I had sewn one of the eggs with the coloured sections being single pieces but it was a definite failure. This one took a few more blocks for me to make up my mind. Apart from the colour I don't like the fact that they won't flow. Rather they will be like eggs on a rock and that is definitely not the look I'm searching for. Oh well back to the drawing board.

Wedding Quilt Border

Have been designing the borders for the wedding quilt off and on   .. well more off than on in truth ... for a few weeks now. This doesn't look too bad. Must try making it up and see how it looks in real life. Mind you the corners aren't right yet but will work on that ... soon. 

I really  must get stuck into this. The wedding is in two months. I suppose the problem of deciding that I couldn't finish it in time is that now I don't see the urgency to get if finished but must get back on to it.

New Centre Designed

After much humming and haaaa......ing I have decided that the wedding quilt centre does nothing for me and so have finally designed a new centre. 

I'm a lot happier with this and can't wait to sit down and actually sew the new rings. 

First up will have to pick the colours. I'm tending towards multicoloured as I feel that will blend in with everything else. Can't wait to see how it turns out.

Change - Yes / No?

In between making more eggs the inner frame options keep popping into my head.  I'm seriously considering remaking the inner frames with yellow/mustard against the inner circle then red and blue for the taller blocks, with a pale white based outer ring. This quilt definitely won't be ready by June, it hasn't even made it to the longarmer for basting yet! Oh well at least I have plenty of time to keep working on my free motion ditch stitching.

Border Eggs

Yes the borders are progressing. I wanted a curved border with spikes and after much designing came up with this. 

I have to make ten eggs plus the corner sections and then float them into the border fabric. The green looks great here and I keep vacillating between that and the one below. The photograph below doesn't do justice to the red and black option below but that is my choice - green inner and purple outer or red & black inner with purple again as the outer .... hmmm looking at these photos I'm still not sure that I like that purple and red in the middle. 

I think I will simply go off and make more eggs and leave the worry for another day :-)

Joy's Central Block

Well I have finished my contribution to Joy's NYB quilt. The inner arcs were taken from the wedding quilt and the extra arc was designed to extend the circle from a 9in to a 13.5in circle. Should be interesting to see what fabrics Joy uses. 

One thing that did surprise me was the number of foundation paper sheets that were needed...24. That has to be the most that I have needed in such a small area. Although with the wedding quilt I did need two per block minimum which makes108 for the central blocks  and I'm still working on the borders.  :-)

What a difference a fabric makes - Joy's NYB

Well what do you think of this version of the wedding quilt? Joy has been making the New York Beauty blocks for one of her grandchildren for several months now. He has requested a quilt with paisley. Isn't it amazing what children ask for and what surprised her even more was that he actually knew what paisley was. She had searched high and low for something other than the traditional dull mud coloured paisleys we are all used to and one day came across the fabric in the background. Isn't it a beauty?

Joy had found a layout that she loved and wanted to substitute the NYB blocks for the circles in it. Only one problem with her original layout .... there was no where to showcase the fabric. So change of plans was called for. She decided that my wedding quilt layout would suit.... it also only needed another 12 blocks as opposed to her original design.

So a few days ago we sat down together to design the setting for her centre. Unlike my quilt, where I have many different backgrounds Joy has only one. We didn't want to bring in another to frame the centre and we didn't want just the feature fabric as that would leave the centre all lost and forlorn.

Joy chose four of my wedding quilt blocks and then I drew up various designs extensions to take the circles out to 15in. Thankfully it only took a few hours to draw ones that matched what Joy was looking for. Lucky she doesn't need them right away as I am flat out with other things I need to do, but if you check back in a few days I will put up the design here so you can see how different it is. It will probably take her another month to make the extra blocks and the centre then I will post that also.

Mind you after working on this design I'm considering redoing my wedding quilt middle...boy will I be glad when I get it finished and can't change my mind again 

Wedding Quilt Progress - Frames completed

Well have finally managed to piece the central frames and join all of the blocks together. I'm not sure if I like it or not but will now start to work on the border. I had initially planned to have plain borders but have now decided to return to a long ago plan of a spiked border ... also somehow incorporating curves. Will be interesting to see what I can come up with.

Central Layout Plans

So today has been spent on the computer working out different layouts for the spaces surrounding the central ring. After spending ages surfing last night I had decided the way to go was a variation of split four patch for both the areas surrounding the central circle and the outer border. I even took out pen and graph paper last night and made a preliminary sketch which looked great! Don't you just love my understated opinion! I would show how great it was but it was just too good to keep and I was glad I only wasted my time and not my fabric as well.

My next idea was to extend the rings that form the inner circle and develop within these more spokes similar to those that I liked throughout the quilt. I hoped to carry the idea of a ring by using the same colours in all four segments, even though the ring was broken by overlapping blocks in places.

Worked it out and was very happy with it until I printed it out and went to lie it in place on the quilt. Slight problem... I had miscalculated the size of the spaces...... back to the drawing board. This time the task was a lot quicker and I now have worked out a design which at least fits the spaces. Yes I realise the above plan looks more balanced but... and this is a big but.... it doesn't fit in the space.

I have tried out a few fabrics and think these will look good. So tomorrow's task is to cut the fabrics and if I'm lucky sew the missing blocks also. If it looks good I might even make a spiked border. I have been tossing up,the idea for a while now. Sometimes think it will look great other times feel it might be over the top....we will see.

Another Option

Well I definitely wasn't happy with either of those two layouts, and I was even less happy with the unpicking. Thankfully it was only the hand stitching as frog stitching is a real pain with the shorter stitch length I prefer these days. As I now press my seams open where possible I have shortened my stitch length to add strength to the seam. Why am I now pressing seams open? Well it gives less bulky spots when machine quilting and while my machine quilting leaves a lot to be desired....one day it will be to dream for. Hey I dream about that now!

So after unpicking a number of seams I have worked out a third layout and it's looking OK. I still need to work out what to do in those spaces around the central block but that is tomorrow's problem.

Layouts for The Wedding Quilt

Well as you can see the wedding quilt is chugging along beautifully....says she with a totally biased viewpoint. I have now finished 55 of the needed 56 blocks. Will get onto the last one ...... soon.

My first plan was to make the quilt 6 x 8 and have a semicircle extending into the border on each side. However when I sat down and checked over my calculations it seemed as though this would leave the quilt just that little bit too narrow. Ok no problems I thought. 6 x 8 + 8 is the same as 7 x 8. See you can tell I was once a maths teacher... no need for that look!

Anyway the ahh ha moment  was soon an mmmmm? moment when I discovered that New York Beauties don't work that well in odd numbered settings. Actually it was a very long soon. You see I'm the kind of person who jumps in and sews things together as soon as an idea comes into my head and then I work out the finer steps.

So on a quick trial and error, taking only about an hour I decided I would make 12 circles and then use the leftover blocks to fill in the gaps. Two days later I have HAND stitched all of the blocks into pairs and have laid them out to check that they still look good. As you can see they don't look good at all. Phooey...will have to look into it further tomorrow!

The Wedding Quilt

I have been very busy this past few months and the wedding quilt is going along great guns. I was actually starting to stress with it and had reached a stage where I was doing too much. to the point that RSI was starting to hurt so I had to slow down. 

Having slowed down it may not be finished by June but hopefully it will be close.

Here are nine of the blocks and in a totally biased opinion I think they don't look too bad. My plan is for 56 different blocks and I have planned and cut the fabric for 54 of them so it's on the way.

New Project

The pale background came from the left overs from a friend's quilt. Lucky the spikes weren't any wider or there wouldn't have been enough fabric.

Well there is a good reason why I haven't been doing much lately.  PJ and Khanam have announced their engagement and so I have been busy sewing some blocks for a possible wedding gift. I have always wanted to make a New York Beauty quilt but finding the time and getting stuck into one just wasn't getting anything happening. A wedding in the new year is definitely an impetus and so I thought I had better start.

This was the first block I made. The spikes were fun but deciding on what colour to make the arcs was a difficult choice.

This is an interesting photo in that the arcs appear to complement the spikes well but depending on the light this is not always the case in real life..... interesting.

Two years ago I won a F8 pack from Moda and thought I would base the quilt on those fabrics. I have since been given other fabrics and although I thought they would all go together when I put them to the test they didn't marry well...so a stash trawl was needed. Personally I love the brightness of these colours

Will be seeing them both in a few weeks and shall see what they think of the colours or if they would prefer a more subtle colour choice. As it is likely to be used and so would dominate their bedroom, I thought it should be made in their colour choice rather than my usual random selection of everything :)

New Project

The pale background came from the left overs from a friend's quilt. Lucky the spikes weren't any wider or there wouldn't have been enough fabric.

Well there is a good reason why I haven't been doing much lately.  PJ and Khanam have announced their engagement and so I have been busy sewing some blocks for a possible wedding gift. I have always wanted to make a New York Beauty quilt but finding the time and getting stuck into one just wasn't getting anything happening. A wedding in the new year is definitely an impetus and so I thought I had better start.

This was the first block I made. The spikes were fun but deciding on what colour to make the arcs was a difficult choice.

This is an interesting photo in that the arcs appear to complement the spikes well but depending on the light this is not always the case in real life..... interesting.

Two years ago I won a F8 pack from Moda and thought I would base the quilt on those fabrics. I have since been given other fabrics and although I thought they would all go together when I put them to the test they didn't marry well...so a stash trawl was needed. Personally I love the brightness of these colours

Will be seeing them both in a few weeks and shall see what they think of the colours or if they would prefer a more subtle colour choice. As it is likely to be used and so would dominate their bedroom, I thought it should be made in their colour choice rather than my usual random selection of everything :)

Wider Border Templates

A few months ago Margaret from Oak Flats gave the suggestion that people use 1/2in seam allowance on the borders rather than1/4in as this allowed them more juggling space in case their blocks were not quite right. To help anyone wanting these templates I have finally managed to find time and have now drawn them up. The link is here

http://tinyurl.com/WiderBorders