A Spring Quilt

It has been a rough couple of weeks in our house.  Olivia and I have been struck down with various flus and other nasties, which put us out of action for over two frustrating weeks.  We are finally back into our normal routine, and I have been getting back into my (temporary) sewing room.  On a more positive note, we are looking forward to moving back into our house soon, after 4 long months of renovations, plus it's Spring time (which makes me very happy)!

I have recently started a new quilt project  - one which has been floating around in my head for quite a while.  This one is going to be a gift for someone very special, so I will have to keep some of the details under wraps. 

It has been fun putting together the fabric 'palette' for this quilt, which includes lots of greens, pinks and apricot tones.  A perfect combination for a Spring quilt I think.  I have been collecting and hoarding 'pretty' pinks and greens for a couple of months now, so it is great to finally have a collection of fabrics that I am happy with.

Did I mention this quilt involves some tricky circle seams?  Something I have never attempted before :-)

While I was out of action with the flu last week, I had a look at some Craftsy classes for the first time.  I had been wanting to sit down and try out one of these classes for ages, so I downloaded Sarah Fielke's tutorial "Big Techniques from Small Scraps", which is available here.  The tutorial is divided into 10 lessons, and covers a few different patchwork and applique projects (I think 4 different projects all up).  The whole thing goes for a couple of hours - I still haven't watched them all! 

I particularly liked the needle-turned applique lessons (which I believe are Sarah's speciality).  There are some great techniques and time-saving methods here, and Sarah's work is very inspiring.  I love watching an expert doing their thing - it is very helpful to a beginner like me to see how a professional quilter works :-)  I highly recommend checking out this tutorial!

Happy sewing,
N  xo

Little things

Well, I've been spending quite a bit of time this week teaching myself how to create a website banner in GIMP, and have just uploaded my 'new look' blog banner (see above).  My third post and I'm already giving this thing makeovers :-)  What do you think?  I'm pretty pleased with the result - it took several attempts and a lot of experimentation to get to this!  I found this blog post quite helpful for getting across the basics of cropping and resizing an image and adding text.

I also figured out how to download a lovely looking font from a free fonts website - http://www.dafont.com/ - it has some great fonts to choose from.  It's really surprisingly easy (once you've spent a couple of hours of frustration trying to figure it out!).  It is definitely good fun though.

Last week I spent some time working on a little sewing project - an appliqued mini-zip pouch - to give to a good friend for her birthday.  It was lots of fun and nice to do something quick and easy.

 
I added some cotton batting onto the back of each piece, to give it a nice padded feel.  The batting was then quilted on using a horizontal machine stitch.  Here is a 'work in progress' shot:

I love this flower-shaped applique design.  It is so simple and effective.  The design is known as an 'orange peel' block to quilters.  I am thinking of incorporating this block in my next quilt, it is so sweet.

Hope you are enjoying your week and finding a little bit of time to sew!

Bright stars quilt

Well it's Wednesday night, my lovely husband has taken a night off to go see a movie and little Miss O is fast asleep and dreaming in her cot, so I thought I would share my latest quilty project.  It's a fun, fast and very colourful pattern, and super easy to make (the next quickest thing to a simple square layout).

This is not a great photo unfortunately, and doesn't really do the bright colours justice.  I'm still learning how to photograph quilts! It's definitely an art.

This quilt was born out of a pile of random solid fabrics that happened to be in a stack.  I liked the mix of colours, so decided to put them all together in a quilt.

The star blocks were made very simply, by cutting away a diagonal strip off a square of coloured fabric and sewing on a piece of white/neutral fabric.  I didn't bother with a template, just cut the approximate size triangles, then I used the corresponding coloured piece to help with cutting the right angle.  Needless to say, there were a couple of mistakes made along the way :-)  The effect of cutting the pieces 'freehand' is that there is a bit of variation in the shape of each star (I like it when things look a little bit irregular - it's a more "handmade" look).

I hope to take a much better shot once I have quilted it.  Not quite sure how I'm going to quilt it yet, will have to think on it some more...

Hi!  Welcome to my first ever blog post on my first ever blog!  I have decided to enter the exciting world of blogging, and am very pleased with myself for getting this thing up and running - quite an achievement for an IT illiterate person such as me :-) 

I'm not exactly sure yet where this will lead, but I'm hoping to use this little blog to record and share my creative adventures, especially in the worlds of quilt-making, patchwork, sewing, embroidery and crafting (and any other crafts I happen to pick up along the way).  I am also hoping this will be a good opportunity to connect with lots of other like-minded crafty, creative types and share tips, inspiration, projects and other useful bits and pieces. 

The other big bonus for me is the opportunity to improve my IT skills - which have a lot of room for improvement, believe me.  This is partly due to having a super-smart IT professional for a husband (which may seem a little counter-intuitive), but which means I haven't had to deal with any tricky computer issues for about the last 8 years... All that is about to change, however - and I've already taught myself how to set up a blog and create a banner - go me!  PS - I managed it with some helpful advice from this blog.

Some other things about me you should know:
 - I've been a sewer since my teens, thanks to my mum who is a very talented dressmaker.  I've always loved playing around and experimenting with fabric.
- I've been making quilts for about the last four years.  My first quilt took me a year and a half to make (I quilted it by hand)!  Since then I've been hooked :-)
- I love colour, pattern and designing and making my own quilts from start to finish.
- I am a recovering Pinterest-aholic, who has only relatively recently discovered Instagram.  Quickly becoming another serious problem..
- I spend most of my time looking after my beautiful 19 month old daughter, who is an absolute joy to be with, and doing other '50s housewifey things like cooking and vacuuming.  When I'm not doing that, I'm busy sewing, making or thinking about making!
- My other favourite things are sleeping, baking yummy treats, drinking chai lattes and tea, going for long walks, swimming, debating religion and politics with my husband and reading storybooks with my daughter - the simple things in life, really :-)

Happy reading,

Nicole