Blogger's Quilt Festival

My entrant this autumn to Amy's Blogger's Quilt Festival is my version of the Camelot quilt so look away now if I've bored the pants off you earlier with previous posts.

I wanted a hand-piecing quilt to take with me when I was out and about during the summer months and The Camelot Quilt seemed like a good idea.

Each block is different and each block requires you to trace the template on to plastic, cut out and then use the plastic templates to cut out your fabric pieces.

Although I thought the pattern was not the best value and the instructions were scant (and there was a mistake!) I really enjoyed the challenge hand-piecing each block.

You can see close-ups of all the blocks in my Flickrstream. I particularly liked this block as I managed to incorporate a piece of fabric with this year's date.

Once I'd done all 16 blocks it was square and I don't really like square quilts.
Square quilts don't invite you to snuggle under them the way rectangular ones do.

So with compass, pencil and paper I drafted four new blocks. This one is probably my favourite.

I then hand-pieced all 20 blocks together.

And then slowly began to hand-quilt it all.

Although it is now bound, I haven't totally finished hand-quilting it as you can see from the back.

I just pick it up every now and then and do a bit more.

So now the nights are chillier, it sits on me keeping me warm in the evening while I add a bit more hand-quilting to it.

The stats bit:  

Size: 65" x 80"

Hand-pieced and hand-quilted by me.

Best category: Hand-quilted quilt, bed quilt and scrap quilt

Click here to see lots of other gorgeous quilts in the Festival.

Mute Monday

, a photo by Little Island Quilting on Flickr.

This one is for you
Susan ;-)

PTS9

Otherwise known as Pillow Talk Swap (Round 9). Still one (if not) my favourite swap on Flickr at the moment.

My starting point was the hugely popular 'X and Y' block. Amy has a very good tutorial for it on her blog. I then substituted the four corners from each block with a Drunkards Path block and came up with this.

The back has a zip....

...which veers off slightly because I was multi-tasking and got distracted by the male presenter on "The Great British Bake Off."

I suspect I'm not the only one.

And as a little aside. My 'Absolutely NEVER EVER Again' quilt is hanging out in all it's Kristafied glory here, here and here.

I can't wait to see it in person.

Pattern Testing

Jenny, of the Quick Curve Ruler fame has a sister Helen who, like Jenny, is also a long-arm quilter.
She's also started designing quilt patterns using Jenny's ruler and when she put a shout out for pattern testers I stuck my hand up.

This is her Deco Zig Zag pattern.

It reminds me of a 'mermaids purse' but maybe that's just me.

Either way, it was extremely enjoyable to sew - the pattern is very well written.

It is fat quarter friendly (two blocks from each FQ) but I chose to make it from random scraps of turquoise blue, mainly because I had some light turquoise linen knocking around that I wanted to use for the background. It wasn't quite enough so I interspersed it with a Kona cotton in a similar colour.

The claret block I put in just because I thought it would add a bit more interest. I think I'll probably hand-quilt round each block with Perle cotton, machine quilt the rest of the negative space and bind it in a claret colour too.

Pssst..2nd row up from bottom, far left...that's a Batik with sparkly bits in it...reckless or what ;-)

What would you do?

Normally, I know where I'm going with the layout of a quilt.
It all seems to go together as I go along.

This time I am stuck.

I want the layout like you can see.
However, I need it to end up as a rectangular shape.

If I add half blocks to the sides, that doesn't work at the top and bottom; you can't get a section of the block in there without slicing into it and I don't think that looks right.

And if I just have half blocks at the side, what do I have at the bottom?

So then I thought maybe I should just add a plain fabric all the way around.

But really, for the first time ever, I think I am stuck.

What would you do?

Oh...and as an added incentive to wade in with your thoughts, I am overflowing with scraps again so if you're interested say so and one of you will get a big squwagy (spell check thinks I just made that word up and I may well have done) envelope of scraps.

Thank you.

My last ever post...

...about the Camelot quilt because it is done.

With the four extra blocks I added it's an ample single bed size

Entirely hand-pieced and hand quilted.

Still  a bit more outlining round the blocks to do.

As with previous hand-quilted quilts,  I didn't bother basting. Just laid all three layers on the ground, scooped it up and then positioned my quilt hoop in the middle of the quilt so it was taut and then quilted my way out from the centre to the edges.

If you want to see individual close-ups of each block, just type 'Camelot' in the search box to the right of this post

It was great fun to do but I have had my fill of fiddly and complicated and am leaning towards more simple at the moment.

Oh, and I realise I never said who would get the pattern.

It'll be on it's way, tea stains and all!

Half square triangle quilt

When I think of simply constructed quilts, I always think of those made just from squares and half-square triangles; the permutations are endless. When it was my month for a bee I was in last year, I asked everyone to make blocks from half-square triangles and the variety that came back was amazing. You can see it here.

And I've always thought the pinwheel block had lots of possibilities to do something fun with so that's how this next quilt came about; and I've even managed to remember to document the process if you want to have a go too.

I chose to make two difference pin wheel blocks.

This one.

And if you don't fancy eight points coming together in the centre of the block, this one.

This one is good for fussy cutting big, dramatic prints.

For the first block you need:

To make the half-square triangles I use the simple way of placing two of the 3 and 7/8" fabric squares right sides together, pencil marking a diagonal line from one corner to the other and then sewing either side.

In the picture above, two of the light grey squares get sewn to the dark grey squares using this method and the other two light grey squares are sewn with the two white squares that measure 3 and 7/8".

This image should give you a clearer idea of what your layout should look like.

The plain white squares are the ones measuring 3 1/2"

If you want a simpler and quicker route to making a pinwheel block that only uses one feature fabric then take out the four centre blocks...

...and fussy cut one big block in the same fabric.
Whichever block you decide, you'll end up with a 12 1/2" unfinished block.

I was aiming for a mixture of both.

I liked how it looked when it got to this stage but felt it still lacked something. I always try to make 'interesting on the eye' quilts. I want the eyes to dart all over, no matter how simple the initial block is. So I decided to add a bit of additional interest to some of the corners.

This bit is purely optional but I took random scrappy bits of fabric (every single one was different and had not been used in any of the blocks), cut them up into 2" squares and then added them to the corner of some of the blocks like this.

It now gives this effect:

Just the right amount of interest for me.
You could add the little triangles to each of the corners which would form a square on point.
I didn't because I thought it would be too overwhelming but more importantly you're then into the realms of trying to get all the corners evenly matched to form the perfect square. Keeping it like this means you don't have to worry about matching anything.

And that's it really.
I hope I've provided a clear explanation but if not, let me know and I'll do my best to answer any queries.

Linking up to WIP Wednesday