Favourite colours.....

I'm on a bit of a bandwagon for orange, green, yellow, blue, grey and red lately with them popping up in at least two quilt projects in a row. Both of which are quilts for little boys.

The first is a quilt for a little man who's turning one shortly. I've used Cluck Cluck Sew's free tutorial for the Scrappy Summer Quilt. This pattern is so easy and comes together so neatly. Currently it's basted and waiting for the Adelaide weather to move on from its never-ending 40 degree plus heat waves (we've had two already!). I love how crisp these colours look.

Then because I was loving the colours so much and am always on the hunt for an excuse to make a quilt, I made a scrappy swoon for a work colleague who's son has had his first baby, and Liz's first grandchild. The pattern is by Camille Roskelley and once I got my head around it, it is pretty easy to turn scrappy....although I could have contrasted the colours against the centre square a bit better. (Must try harder next time!) It's one single Swoon block, set inside 8" of solid borders which makes a 40" square quilt.

The back is a single metre piece of Spotlight fabric picked up for a song last year. It's the perfect turquoise for a little boy.

Actually, this whole quilt didn't require one cent of expenditure....I had it all. Scraps, enough solid, enough binding and enough batting to frankenpiece! I love a gift from 'nothing'!

Last Christmas the Sew & Sew's girls decided to give an end-of-year gift of our scraps to each other. Just reporting in girls....but I have managed to use gifted scraps in both of these quilts and another so far this year. (Red pin dot - M, Grey mice - K, Green floral - C) It's a lot of fun to use other people's fabrics, that's for sure.

I've linked to Crazy Mom's Finish it up Friday!

From Swoon scrap....

...to active Spools component!
I can't stand throwing away fabric and when you work on some quilts you end up with little off-cuts that are just too precious to throw away.
We pay so much for fabric in Australia, regardless of the fact that the fabric might have been ordered online from overseas and with our current exchange rate. It might be cheaper by the metre or yard but there's still the postage to consider. So in my book, it still costs and anything that's cut off is just too, too hard to part with, particularly when a design calls for lots of trimming.
To ease my 'fabric guilt' I have zip-lock bags a-go-go, each full of bits of this and bits of that. I divide them into solids and prints and by size and they're born along the way, out of what I make.
Constructing Swoon, by Camille Roskelly was no exception. Each of those flying geese had lots of trimming and lots of discard. I have already used the coloured off-cuts in a little quilt and I popped the plain background triangles in a baggy...."for Ron". (A.K.A. 'later on'.)

Ironically (actually, tell me if it's not irony...), I'm working on another Thimble Blossoms pattern by Camille called Spools. It calls for these tiny little squares of 1 1/4" to be placed on the corners of the tops and bottoms of the 2" cotton spool strips. These squares are then trimmed to form tiny little triangles. Quite clever really.
As I was driving home the other day, I recalled that I had a bag of triangles in Kona Snow, the same fabric that I used for the background of  this quilt and the same that I'm using now. Surely I could re-use these triangles for the squares to make the triangle corners required for this pattern.

Now I realise that we're ultimately talking about 6" or so worth of width of fabric to cut down each of these 140 little squares. But width of fabric is precious. That fabric could be the make or break of a border strip. So I delved into the stash to find the zip lock with the Swoon triangle off-cuts in Snow, turned them out and cut them down to sort of 1 1/4" squares. As it happened, there was a little corner nicked off of each square. But seeing as one corner of the triangle gets cut off anyway, I didn't see this as a major problem.

It worked like a charm. I actually got my 140 x 1 1/4" squares out of 140 off-cut scrappy triangles and created my triangle corners for each of my strips.

I might have had to cut twice as many times to get my 'square' but as I said before, I've left yardage in good shape and the end result is just as grand! I didn't keep what I cut off....that would be just too thrifty....or perhaps I haven't yet devised a plan to use tiny teeny triangles....hummmm the mind boggles!

 

I can't wait to see this quilt. I'm using a jelly roll of Snippets by American Jane for Moda that I bought  oh so long ago (see my first post) ...and forgot that I owned. I'm loving the colours and I'm loving the thrift!

Swoon...

It's finished! And at 80" square, by far the biggest quilt I've ever quilted. It's so big I struggled to come up with a spot to take a full length photo but seeing as necessity is the mother of invention I'm thrilled I worked out the hanging spot from the batting under the verandah porch! I'll be using that little trick again for sure. So the quilt? I love the pattern. The blocks are large and simple to piece and their beauty appears before your eyes as the piecing comes together. I don't have any favourite blocks....they're all lovely but I do wish I'd been a little more adventurous in my fabric selections. Next time! The pattern is Swoon designed by the very clever Camille Roskelly. You can buy the pattern from the link on her blog. The fabric is Denyse Schmidt's Picnics and Fairgrounds from Spotlight in Australia and Kona Snow. And the quilting is free motion stippling by me!

Mission accomplished....

After what ended up being one of those frightful days at work when an urgent job crops up and you're the only one in the office and you end up working from whoa-to-go sorting out...I doubly couldn't wait to get home. One, for the glass of wine to calm me down and two, to finish off my last block for my Swoon quilt. There's nothing better than putting it all behind you for some creative time behind the pedal of the Bernina! So mission accomplished! The last block is finished (top left)....now onto the sashing and borders. Here is the complete set on the floor. It's already looking rather large....I can't wait for it to be all neatly sashed and better yet....quilted!

Semi moment of fame....

Camille Roskelly the designer of my current favourite ranges of fabric, Bliss and Ruby, and the designer of my current favourite quilt pattern, Swoon, is featuring all the Swoon blocks from her Flickr site on her most recent blog post. And guess what? I'm part of the post! How cool is that? I'm mildly chuffed. Thanks Camille.
Here's the link....my blocks are 16th from the bottom....that will force you to look at them all now, won't it!
And seeing how gorgeous everyone else's quilts are, I better get a wriggle on to finish mine....two more blocks to go!

Good intentions.....

I have been enjoying having some time off work to be with the kids during school holidays. Needless to say, the weeks leading up to the break held many selfish thoughts about how much sewing I was going to get done and how many unfinished projects in the pile would move to the completed side of the ledger. Guess what? It didn't happen! Nope, not one finish! (Well not yet anyway.) You know how it goes. Drop child one off to scheduled school holiday program, come home, put on a load of washing, have a coffee, hang out washing, entertain child two, sit down at sewing machine, get up from sewing machine, make lunch, put another load of washing in, do some study, pick up child one...etc. The outcome of all this at-home busyness was a pile of starts. I now have more UFO's than you can shake a stick at! But of course, it depends on how you look at that scenario. For example. I delved back into my scrap bin and started to make confetti blocks like those featured in the new Block Party book by Alissa Haight Carlton and Kirsten Lejnieks. I've managed 12 blocks and have used a mountain of small scraps and almost all of the those tiny bits of white that I can't bear to part with. So whilst the scrap bin is looking delightfully empty, 12 blocks is not enough for a quilt, so I've shelved that idea for the moment. Then I spent two nights cutting out the fabric for 9 Swoon blocks. Swoon is a new pattern by Camille Roskelly and it's beautiful. I had to really get my head around the cutting and fabric matching but now that it's done I have a little production line happening with the blocks. I'm using the new Denyse Schmidt fabric, Picnic and Fairgrounds from Spotlight along with some solids and Kona Snow. I've made 4 so far. Again, they've been pushed to the side because yesterday afternoon I started a little baby quilt following some surprise news. I'm keeping that one under wraps for the moment but let's just hope that it becomes one of those quick turn-around, highly satisfying finishes! I hope so, I'm back to work on Tuesday and would really like to show something off after all those good intentions!