Bloggers Quilt Festival

It's Bloggers Quilt Festival time again, hi to everyone who is visiting for the first time and thank you for taking the time to come and visit.

This is the second Raw Edge Circle Quilt from a tutorial by Allison at Cluck Cluck Sew, that I've made. It's such a simple but effective design and was finished earlier this year. This quilt came about as I was trying to think of a design to make as a house warming present for very good friends of mine. With a little bit of sleuth work I found out that the colour scheme for the house was going to be neutrals and browns and that there was going to be a burnt orange glass splashback in the kitchen.
Fortunately I spied this colour scheme below from Design Seeds which helped with the inspiration for the colours to use.

My original colour palette included more browns, but it just didn't work well. In fact it looked pretty awful.

I added some oranges, it didn't look much better.

Eventually I decided to remove most of the browns and add a lot more dark and burnt oranges.

I'm so glad I persevered with playing with the colour choices as it really made a difference. The idea was to use the oranges and creams for the circles and the greys and browns as the background for each block.

I used over forty different fabrics. None of them scraps!

I quilted the circles with a simple spiral, and a meandering pattern for the background. The quilting wasn't dense as I wanted a soft finish that would drape well.

I'm so very happy with this one and I hope you like it too.

I found a fabulous flannel that worked beautifully for the backing. I ordered it online and when it arrived it was one of those miraculous moments - a perfect match. How often does that happen when you order something from a computer screen and just hope that it will work!

"Grey Skies and Sunshine" in it's new home, and a perfect match for the kitchen wall  the kitchen cabinets and the sofa.

Bloggers Quilt Festival for me, is a wonderful way to find new and interesting blogs and find some beautiful quilts that I may have missed otherwise. If you leave a comment I'll definitely pop on over to have a look at your festival quilt too.
Thank you so much to Amy for hosting the festival and also to the sponsors that make it all the more exciting.

Blogger's Quilt Festival

Thank you so much to Amy for hosting the quilt festival. Its a wonderful way to meet lots of fabulous talented bloggers, and sometimes leads to newfound friendships.

Today I would like to show you a quilt I made for my daughter.

I bought a fat quarter bundle of Plume by Tula Pink early 2010 after my daughter had said how much she loved the colours and the prints.
It took me ages to decide on a pattern, I finally chose a pattern by Atkinson Designs, Between Friends which called for 14 1/2 inch blocks. I thought this would showcase the larger prints in the range.

After looking at all the prints and wanting to make a queen sized quilt I added some Kona and Bella solids to the mix to break it up a bit.

The first blocks, I love these colours

I started putting it together in November 2010. It was so big that to work out how I wanted the layout of the blocks, I had to take it over to my parents house as I didn't have a large enough floor space.

The quilt top finally finished

It was too big, 87 inches by 87 inches, for me to tackle the quilting so I sent it off to my favourite long arm quilter, Fiona. She did a wonderful job, the all over pattern echoes some of the prints.

The binding and backing is Kona Bright Pink. I also used one of the feather designs in the backing.

A not very good photo of part of the back.

My daughter loves it and I'm really happy I've made something that she loves! 

It's called Paradise because of the Birds of Paradise on the fabric and my blog name!

Bloggers Quilt Festival Fall 2011

Bloggers Quilt Festival- Spring 2011

 

A great big thank you to Amy from Amy's Creative Side for hosting the Bloggers Quilt Festival this week and to all the fabulous sponsors who have joined in to make this such a spectacular event.

As usual I decided to enter this particular quilt with only days left to finish it. It doesn't matter what time frame I have to work with, I always leave it to the very last minute. Not good for stress levels, but it's a finish.

Here is Summer In Paris.

This quilt developed from an idea after seeing the fabric below, Paris Map by Yoko Okomato.

Photo from Fabricworm

I wanted to make a quilt that captured memories of Paris and the lovely gardens throughout the city.  I found some beautiful co-ordinating fabrics, including Larkspur by Alexander Henry, which took my breath away with the soft colours and  luscious designs. One of my favourite parts of making a quilt is playing with the fabric and "auditioning" fabrics that work well together both in colour and design/style.

My original idea was based on a Kaffe Fassett pattern, the fabrics dominate the design, and are cut into larger pieces where they can be seen at their best. 

I liked the central square, but I thought the pattern was a little too regimented. I then found the Modern Rose Garden pattern at Carolina Patchworks.

This lacked the central square but it was a much more random layout.  From these two ideas that weren't quite right, I decided to develop my own pattern. The tricky part was working out the math to make blocks that would all fit together nicely but be random in size and placement.  It was ideal to show off these beautiful fabrics, including Joel Dewberry Modern Meadow, It's a Hoot by Momo, Parisville, and some Kona solids.  There was a bit of fussy cutting involved too.

Despite worrying whether it was going to look great when finished, (I always worry that what is fabulous in my head doesn't look at all nice at the end), I was very pleased with the final result.

My intention was to quilt it myself, but when the top was finally completed, I had absolutely no idea how I was actually going to quilt it. I hadn't given the quilting any thought at all during the whole process. After asking for suggestions and receiving some fabulous responses and ideas, I chickened out and sent it to Fiona my local long arm quilter. I'm so very glad I did as the quilting is fabulous. Part of the quilting design echoes the swirls in the fabric used for the sashing and also the Patty Young, Zen Garden.

I used Kona Lupine for the binding, the first time I have used a solid for binding. The backing is from Ikea.

                               

I'm thrilled with this quilt, and I'm going to use the same pattern to make a quilt in each of the four seasons.

Here's a sneak peek of the fabric I'm collecting for the autumn/fall quilt, Autumn In Paris.

Thank you for stopping by and taking the time to visit.  There are so many beautiful quilts to see at the Quilt Festival, I can't wait to have a look at them all this week.

Bloggers Quilt Festival - Fall 2010

Amy from Amy's Creative Side is hosting the Bloggers Quilt Festival,  and this is the first time I've joined in. I have really enjoyed looking at the beautiful quilts that people have chosen for this festival, there are so many creative and amazing people in the world, and we are so lucky to be able to see their work.

This is the first quilt in which I used pre-cut strips, in fact it's the only quilt I've used pre-cut strips. I have a love hate relationship with jelly rolls. They always looks so inviting and beautiful until they are opened and then they slump into a mass of floppy strips.  I have a few more rolls in my stash, waiting to be used.
When I returned to quilting from a very long break, this was the first  roll I bought,  Japanese indigo fabric from my local quilt shop.  I separated the strips into two piles, indigo and cream/off white and indigo/multi coloured.

The indigo/off-white strips were used on the front and the muti coloured ones were incorporated in the pieced back.  I used a template from the book "East Quilts West" by Kumiko Sudo for the applique flowers.

This quilt  has been very frustrating to photograph as it changes colour in practically every shot, sometimes looking, grey often purple and occasionally indigo The reds can change from orange to a deep red. Thanks to my blog friends I persevered and finished it.  I learnt that basting is an essential part of quilting and you can never have enough pins ( I should have used more)  and I should have quilted each line from the alternate side to stop buckling and ripples. It's not perfect, but I'm very happy with it.

The back, the indigo/multi coloured strips were pieced into the middle strip.

Every quilt has to have the final stamp of approval.