Putting on Old Jeans for the Festival

My entry for this Bloggers' Quilt Festival is this quilt which regular visitors to my blog will have seen before.

Each block is 16" square and the whole is 258" around the perimeter, so I'm entering in the large quilt category.

This quilt has been in the queue for a number of years really as I've collected an ever bigger pile of the family's jeans. I guess most people have a kind of jeans hierarchy? One has a pair of newish smartish jeans and then a Saturday pair or two, often mended and comfortably dented and then a gardening/ walking the dog (who's good at retrieving a slobbery sandy ball) pair and then, if you're me, a painting or irredeemably dirty job pair, then I often cut them off for shorts for a season or two, then they can become a quilt. Sometimes this full cycle is interrupted in the case of kids who grow out of them before they're worn out and they wait to be passed on to another sibling or cousin. Sometimes by this time we've looked away and the next kid is suddenly too big, or the jeans are too straight, or too flared or just not the thing. Then- they can become a quilt; or even if the whole jeans are generally bitsy, some parts can be salvaged.

This block was inspired by the ceiling in our local concert hall

Gratuitous shot of our Lab/ GSP cross: Pepi

It was quick to piece and put together and I like the way you can see our history in them. These are all items we've worn, with the exception of the stripe, which is left over fabric from a shift dress I made our daughter when she was young and the lightest dusty blue which was another from my stash.
I deliberately left the unpicked seam lines showing and some bits with worn knees or even the odd stain.

This lovely heavy quilt was just going to be a family sofa quilt, but our son really liked it and his 21st quilt wasn't quite going according to plan, so I was happy to allow this one to fit the bill. It'll be lovely and warm for his student flat. I had planned to back it with a vintage floral brushed cotton gifted from my mum's stash, but Sam preferred this subtly textured gray, so I'll put the floral to use on another quilt in due course. I added a back pocket from an old favourite pair of my husband's and the label is tucked inside the pocket

I quilted in the ditch around each piece and with a double line around each block in jeans yellow to echo the binding, which is a Carolyn Friedlander Botanics print

Happy Festival viewing! I missed the last one, so am looking forward to viewing the entries this time.

Shirt Love

I have been working on this quilt off and on for several months. And it's the first finish in my Q2 goals for the Finish Along. Yay! The collection of materials for this quilt has taken place over several years. I had asked my husband and brother to save their cotton shirts for this project once the collar and cuffs got too scruffy for work wear. The beautiful soft cottons are destined probably for several quilts.

Here's the first which I'm entering in the nick of time for the Bloggers' Quilt Festival. Fading light and uncharged proper cameras make for less than perfect pics for the time being unfortunately. 

Maybe I can update this post with some better ones in a day or two.

I based it roughly on a Kaffe Fassett design which is conveniently constructed in four panels: asymmetrical left and right panels and a top and bottom panel across the width of the quilt.

I constructed the back from a lovely piece of paisley flannel I've had in my stash for a few years. It was made up to size with some favourite old kids' pyjamas and flannel scraps from another quilt.

I considered calling this quilt Working Style since that seems to be the favoured shirt brand! I left several of the labels in place to allude to the former life of these fabrics.

For the binding I ended up deciding to add two strips of the red I used in the back to echo the few reds in the quilt itself and they provide a nice counterpoint to the more sober Architextures crosshatch which provides the majority of the binding.

I've quilted it in widely spaced lines along the piecing. I may or may not add some red hand quilting in due course?!

 For time saving, although I generally enjoy the hand sewing process to finish, I elected to machine this one in the ditch on the front to catch in the edge of the double fold.

 I can see this one getting lots of use in the cooler months for sitting reading or watching. It's the prototype for a few more quilts using these fabrics and more which keep coming my way :-)

Quilt Stats:

Size 70x75" Total 290"

Cotton Shirts with cotton flannel backing

Bamboo cotton batting

Machine bound and quilted

Bloggers Quilt Festival

The time has come around again for this fantastic festival.

It is always so inspiring to see all the amazing quilts people make.

Welcome if you're visiting from the festival- hope you enjoy having a look around.

My entry is a quilt I have just finished for a friend's 50th birthday.  

SPOILER ALERT!! 

Nigel, if you're reading this and you want any element of surprise, discipline yourself to look away now!

The decision process on what to make was quite protracted, then it took even longer to make it; mainly because I was slow and we were in different countries. Throw in an international move and time goes by so fast so now I'm nearly a year late! Making quilts for friends and family can be quite difficult because of differing tastes, but we had a lot of agreement on this one.

We pinned inspiration photos on a shared Pinterest board and had thought we'd come up with a plan; but then I just didn't feel inspired about our first decision which involved loads of narrow stripes, which would have looked look amazing but been quite tedious to do.  The colour palette emerged quite early: an ochre theme being common to many of the things Nigel pinned. I also decided that using shot cotton would give it the colour depth I was after. 

In the end we were inspired by this. I think it is by Tommy Fitzsimmons of Tommy's Art Quilts  so I would like to acknowledge her amazing work, very much more subtle and complex than mine.

The size of this is 47 x 68.5" so it just squeaks into the Small Quilt category. But I've decided to enter it into the Modern Quilts category.

 I wanted to make it quite improvisationally, so I cut panels in the approximate dimensions and experimented with the arrangement on my design wall. 

I wanted to have gently wavy insertions and a general sense of wiggliness, so I stacked the fabrics right sides up and cut improvisational curves with the rotary cutter.

And then just built and inserted until I was happy.

I hadn't done this kind of curved piecing before but it went OK. Long gentle curves are much easier than small Drunkards Path blocks!

I quilted it using a variegated cotton thread, in long organic wavy lines to echo and accentuate the piecing.

I backed it using good old Ikea Nummer which I bought a bolt of before we moved to an Ikea-less country!

It makes such a versatile backing and here I highlighted the relevant number with a wavy frame of the different shot cottons.

For the binding I used left over strips of the various fabrics in the quilt.

After  trialling many different methods for attaching the binding over the years I have come back to my favourite: narrow doubled binding, machine stitched onto the front and hand sewn down onto the back.

I was bit nervous about washing it as I hadn't prewashed the fabrics, but I put in a colour catcher and all was well!

Hopefully it's the perfect size for a bit of coziness when reading or to drape over a chair

Isn't it funny how a quilt never looks finished until it's been bound and washed to find all its lovely crinkliness!

Now I'm off to look at all your entries in the festival...

Bloggers' Quilt Festival

Only earlier this year did I discover The Bloggers Quilt Festival which runs twice a year. Sometimes it seems that if I follow the blogs of other quilters, every day can be a bloggers quilt festival! It's always energising to see others' work online; but this event  is a great chance to really enjoy everyone's finished work all at once. It's also a good way to discover new creative people whose style you admire.

I've posted about this quilt before, but I chose it for the festival as I think it's my favourite so far, insofar as it was me stepping outside my comfort zone and trying to capture the essence of something I never tire of looking at. It was the first time I tried to do something completely out of my own head. It's very simple, but it's encouraged me to continue to practice being creative...

Since I've been in Australia I've loved the seeming endless tones of gum tree bark on the trees in our local conservation park.

Combined with the many and varied soft eucalypt greens of the leaves, it's an inspiring colour palette.


For the process of making this quilt I took nearly a hundred photos of the aforementioned bark and then ordered over 60 colours of Kona solids (- yay for the colour card) in tones I had seen in the bark and made a simple block with strips of three or four colours each. I cut pieces of fabric a bit bigger than the finished blocks of 19.5 x27 cm (71/2 x 101/2 inches) slashed them in to three or four and recombined them. In the end I culled the blocks to consolidate the colour range to capture the palette I was after, using I think only 23 shades in the end.

I took it back to the source of its inspiration for the photos.

 I pieced a strip for the back, which is mainly Kona Coal, using scraps and inserting a couple of slivers of Kona Pomegranate to reference the gum flowers.

That tree must be very old!


I wanted the skinniest binding in the darkest brown (Espresso I think), so I cut it 2" and doubled it over and it was hard work hand-sewing it down that skinny. Resolved to do 2 1/2 " next time...

I machine quilted it in this free motion bark like pattern, which actually goes lengthways on the quilt

Stats:

Size: Throw size- 64x47" (163x120cm for you metricists)

Quilted: FMQ by me on domestic machine

Best Categories: Throw; Home Machine Quilted and Quilt Photography?

Entry Number: 58