Busy little geese quilt

  Recently I decided I'd done enough embroidered geese so have just started putting them into a cot   I'm still trying to decide if it would have been better to go with pastel shades of  fabric.

Victorian Lady No 1

 

 

The First of my Victorian Ladies is now stitched

 

 

I am using split stitch, split from above.

 

 

The thread is dark brown  Madeira Silk Floss.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

 

 

And Victorian Lady No 2 is printed ready to stitch.

 

I am delighted with the process of printing on fabric. 

 

Thinking of doing five ladies to include in a quilt.

I just love these clothes.  At least they are lovely to look at - I don't know how comfortable they would be to wear.

Printing on Fabric - Learning from Mary Corbett

What a debt we owe Mary Corbet for all the help we get from her blog.  This week she wrote about printing on fabric using freezer paper to give the fabric substance for feeding through the printer.  I had used commercially prepared fabric for my two BMX quilts but from now on my fabric choice is practically unlimited, using Mary's method.

So my Good Friday morning was spent on a Treasure Hunt for a small roll of freezer paper that I knew was lurking somewhere around the house.  Found it.

I had a project in mind since seeing the Victorian Ladies designs by Sentimental Stitches.   For me the trouble was that the ladies were 17" tall.  I would find that too large for the kind of quilts that I make.  The other trouble was that with the digital download of the pattern each lady came in three parts which you were intended to print and tape together before transferring your pattern to your fabric.

But I wanted to follow Mary's instructions which involved preparing an A4 size piece of fabric to fit the computer tray.

So.... It was a case of open up Photoshop, cut and paste the three pieces together to make the lady, then crop this image , cutting off the excess background. You can see the lines where I have made the join.

Over to Word and insert this into a blank page, adjusting the size to fill most of the page.  Print a test page on paper  to check the size.

I put my freezer paper with fabric attached into the printer tray, which with my printer is a  shallow drawer under the printer and the printer picked it up and printed it perfectly first try.  That is quite unusual in my life !  As I had been using a closely woven quilting fabric I didn't feel the need to use sticky tape around the edges.  The freezer paper was well adhered then trimmed to A4 size using the rotary cutter and this gave sharp edges which were of no trouble to the printer.

To embroider it I am using Madeira Pure Silk in a dark brown which I an finding so beautifully easy to thread into the needle. And I am happy with the background fabric - the pattern has a Victorian feel to it.

I have read many sets of instructions for printing on fabric over the last two or three years but this is the first time, when reading Mary Corbett's explanations, that I felt confident enough to try it for myself.  Now I have so many quilts in mind using this technique   that I will never have enough time to make them all.

A Block for a Baby

This is a cute little block with tabs to encourage a toddler to grasp things, but soft and squishy enough for Mum or Dad to grab. The 4 inch square sides are embroidered with a, b, c and 1, 2, 3

The pattern came from A Little Different, that wonderful shop in Sharp St, Newtown (Geelong)   The first task was to do the embroideries then cut the squares down to size.  This time I remembered to put a backing on the fabric first.

Lay them out as the pattern shows, then join, adding tabs randomly as you go,  and stuff.

AFL Football

It's Grand Final Day in Melbourne today for the Australian Football League, the real game of football, and no, Geelong is not playing today.  But the faithful never fade and yesterday in our Friday group Pam was doing the binding on her Geelong Football quilt.  It was made from de-constructed bed linen for the Geelong Cats symbols and hand embroidered with the years when Geelong won the premiership. all nine of them.    Such a lot of years.

One very imaginative lady, to put that together.

Flowers and Ribbons Quilt

It is over three years since I finished these flower embroideries.

 But then I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with them.  They were from an Inspirations magaxine some time ago but they had used them in an all white quilt, which was absolutely beautiful, straight out of a glossy magazine spread, but rather impractical in my world.

So every now and then I would come across them in the drawerr then put them back again.  I just didn't want to do my usual way of just having a rectangular border around each embroidery.  But the last time this happened some scraps of fabric were near the flowers which just happened to look like ribbons and a local shop had a sale on with fat quarters for $3  each so I was able to get a variety of fabrics for the ribbons.

What next ?  Well I'm thinking perhaps a very narrow, slightly bright border first, then a wider border in one of the ribbon fabrics if any of them are still availab.e

Shame on me but I forgot to put backing on the white fabric before I started the embroideries..  This is not a good idea. And the white fabric is a bit transparent so I hope when  the white batting is behind it the seams won't be quite so obvious.

I hope that having got this far that it doesn't sit in the drawer  too long while I make up my mind on how to  continue.

A Hexagon of Diamonds

It's eight months since I last posted here but these days there really is an overload of information to be absorbed and an overload of things I want to do so posting my quilting, even though it has never stopped, hasn't exactly sent me running to the keyboard.

But here is what turned out to be the simplest and fastest lap  quilt that I have ever made - a series of diamond shapes which radiate from the centre and fit into a hexagon.

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Part of its simplicity comes from the cutting out.  Six inch strips are cut across the fabric simply using the width of your six inch ruler.  Then each strip is cut tinto diamonds using the 60 degree line on the ruler.

Because there was no measuring, just using the width of the ruler for the cutting, I found the piecing was much more accurate than with my usual measure and cut.

The backing is also easy as the finished width of the quilt is just right for using one width of your normal quilting fabric.

I followed the instructions for the quilt at Sewn by Leila