An Otter baby quilt

This little quilt was so much fun to make, I really feel like I'm getting my sewjo back.
It's using Lewis and Irene Down by the River fabrics. This fabric line is so pretty, but I felt it needed a little lift so I teamed it with yellow (Bella solids Buttercup 9900.51)
I had bought the fabrics with the intention of following this shannon fabrics pattern. However after using that pattern for the Safari Scribbles Quilt I thought I would try something different.
Lewis and Irene do produce patterns to go with their fabric ranges, but I felt that the suggestions for this range were too fussy and didn't show the fabrics to their best. In the end I decided to follow this pattern, with the slight adaptation of omitting the half square triangles. Because of this change I was able to strip piece the four patches, and the quilt top went together like a dream. Cutting and piecing was all accomplished in one rainy weekend.  The other deviation from the pattern was to add a narrow border. This was added to separate the quilt top from the binding as I was using the same fabric in both. So it has a 2" strip of teal from my stash which I hope picks up the blue of the kingfishers and finishes off the quilt.
Although Aberystwyth now has two newly opened fabric shops, they both are in the fledgling stages and there isn't a great range of stock yet. I couldn't find a suitable cotton to use as backing, so am using fleece.
It is the first time I have used minkee. I was suprised how different it is to fleece. Although it's lovely and soft, it's very thin, and has a right and wrong side.  It will need a wadding as well to give the quilt weight and make it snuggly. This does cancel out one of the benefits of fleece in my opinion.
We took the quilt out for photography on a sunny, but very cold and windy late Autumn day. Unfortunately it fell in a muddy puddle early on, so is slightly grubbier than I'd like in the photos.  The upside is that I have seen how well it stands up to washing!
Here are the photos...

Safari Scribbles quilt

Finally, I have time to do some sewing again. I had a busy first six months of the year, studying for an extra qualification at work. But the coursework is completed, the exams have been sat, and now I can get back to the enjoyable things in life while I wait for the results.

To rest and recuperate I had a week of annual leave in July. We spent the first half of the week helping my brother out with some DIY, he's helped me a lot lately, so I felt good returning the favour. Back home again and the plan was to go walking the rest of the week. However, this is the weather we woke up to.

Nothing else for it - I decided to stay in and sew. With two looming deadlines- a new baby neice or nephew due at the end of August, and a special birthday for my Mum in September, I needed to get on with the gift-making.

The baby quilt was the first to be tackled. I am doing my best to use up stash fabric, and had some lovely soft flannel  waiting for a project. This pattern by Shannon Fabrics has been on my wish list for a while, but it has been surprisingly difficult to find exactly three prints that go together to make it. Frustratingly, fabrics seem to fall naturally into pairs or groups of four, but not threes. The three patterned fabrics are from the Michael Miller Nature Babies range and the orange spots which I've used for sashing are F3665 from Scenic Route by Riley Blake.  Although both are quilting flannel, and are similar enough to allow them to be sewn together easily, the Michael Miller fabric feels thicker and firmer, while the Riley Blake fabric still has a little bit of stretch even after pre-washing.

Full of enthusiasm I started cutting late at night despite being tired...This was the first mistake. The pattern is designed for minkee cuddle fabric, and has half inch seams. I was using flannel with quarter inch seams. All my pieces were too big. I decided to drink some tea and ponder whether to cut half an inch off each side or find some other bodge to make it all fit. 

Michael Miller Nature Babies

 

The solution I chose in the end was to cut the orange sashing in half lengthways and trim a quarter of an inch off each long piece.  I now have a whole lot of orange strip scraps, but I am happy with how this quilt has turned out, and think the proportion of the blocks might even look better with a bit less orange. I left the sashing between blocks the original width.

The next mistake might be obvious to those people with a better sense of size and scale than me.  This photo shows the quilt blocks laid out across the foot of my king sized bed. It was only now,  after I had added the sashing between blocks and laid out the two halves of the quilt that I spotted the problem.

It's a cuddle jungle out there

This lovely soft snuggly flannel quilt was intended for a new born baby.  It measures approximately five foot by three foot, which is way, way bigger than a cot.  

I do really like the layout of this pattern, and I did consider just carrying on and finishing the quilt as it was.  However, I think that the fabrics are just too babyish for a quilt that size.  By the time the baby is big enough to have a quilt this big, he or she will be too old to like it.  

I decided to treat this second mistake as a bonus, and make two half sized quilts from the blocks.  The easiest way to do this would have been just to split the quilt down the middle as it is in the photo above.  However, this has all the directional prints facing the same way, which would be sideways across the quilts. This jarred with me, so I unpicked all the sashing between blocks, and shuffled them around until I got a new layout which I liked, with the directional prints all facing different ways. 

For backing I just used a big piece of the blue animal print.  I decided for the quilting to practice some more free motion.  Since I am still very much a learner, I chose to do an irregular loop de loop pattern.  I feel that the it looks a bit (a lot) like childish scribbles, which tie in with the baby-themed fabrics.  I used variegated orange Silk finish cotton by Mettler, simply because it was on offer at a local shop.  I won't use this thread again.  I loved the colour, but I had quite a few problems with the tread snapping.  This might be due to my poor free-motion technique though.  

The wadding was a 100% cotton from the sewing shop in Machynlleth.  It is quite heavy and released a huuuuge amount of fluff as I was quilting it.  I had to clean the bobbin race out about four or five times as it got so clogged with fluff!  I didn't take any photos of my quilting before I washed it, and it has gone very, very crinkly after a short 40C wash.  The crinkling is all attributable to the wadding since I had prewashed the flannel fabrics before use. Some people don't like this look, but I'm happy that any sewing wobbles get hidden in all those crinkles.

We're off to gift this to my new baby Neice tomorrow, so I hope she (and her parents) like it!

Final finishes of 2016

These two makes both got finished between Christmas and New year. The blanket was started around easter, but with other projects taking priority it has been neglected for a while. It's just simple granny clusters and has been my in-between project, for when I felt like making something, but didn't have the concentration for anything complicated. I don't have a recipient in mind yet.

The tractor  t shirt was started and finished all in one day on New Year's Eve . My nephew whose birthday is 2nd January is going through a  keen tractor phase. We saw some cute Tshirts which I nearly bought, but they were £25 each! I couldn't bear to waste so much money on something so simple. I decided to buy a T shirt and add some appliqué.
Unfortunately it wasn't quite so simple. The really tricky part was finding a plain T shirt to start with.  It took a lot more hunting than I expected. The buttons were a lucky find, and the  applique luckily all went quite smoothly.  I am pleased with the outcome and I hope that he is too.

The doily dress

The time has finally come when I can reveal the purpose of all the doily making.  Let me present....

...my wedding dress!

As soon as I saw Jillian's  beautiful creation on Pinterest I thought that it would be wonderful if I could recreate something similar for myself.  She says that she made her dress in two weeks - that girl must crochet like lightning!  As documented here, I have been slowly making doilies for over a year (just in case).  This work was also interspersed with other crochet and quilting projects.  Around six months ago my partner and I decided to finally take the plunge and get married, so the project stepped up pace. 

I was very nervous about how the dress would turn out, after all, your wedding dress is guaranteed to get a lot of scrutiny! I am so happy and relieved that it turned out like I hoped. Here are some more pictures from the big day!

The nitty gritty

For those who like to know the hows and the whys, here are all the details of how I made the dress.

First I made a base dress. This is made using Vogue 8897 in blue polyester satin.
Next I used the same pattern pieces to make a net copy of the dress. The net is to give the doilies support, so that the weight didn't drag them out of shape.

All the doilies were made individually following patterns found free on the internet. I've counted them all, and there are 116 doilies on the dress; these vary from the biggest at over three foot, to teeny tiny ones an inch across. I wanted to only use each pattern twice, but there weren't enough very small patterns, so there are about a dozen of the tiny gap-filling flowers.

Using many, many safety pins, I arranged the doilies on the dress and then sewed them by hand to the net layer. It was essential to use a dressmakers dummy for this, as I needed the doilies to take the shape of the dress.

The net and the satin layers are only joined at the back, where I sewed the two together down each side of the zip. I didn't want an obvious line to show the zip, so I used hook and eye fasteners to close the doilies over the top.

I can remove the doily layer and have a very wearable blue satin dress. I am undecided what to do with the doilies now. They are all cotton, and sewn on with cotton thread, so one possibility is dying these to a less bridey colour.  After all this work its a shame to only wear it once!

Flower fairies quilt

When I made the spring on the building plot quilt for my nephew, I had to also make something for his little sister. Since the jelly roll had been so quick and easy for his quilt, I decided to go down the pre-cut route again and chose a charm pack from the Flower Fairies range by Fabric Freedom. I kept the layout very simple, so this little quilt was very speedy.

To add a bit more interest I decided to try out some of the fancy stitches on my sewing machine. They do help to liven the quilt up, but they were very slow, and used huge amounts of thread. I think this quilt would look even better with a bit of free motion quilting, but that is a skill I need a lot more practice at.

Once again I backed this quilt with snuggly soft fleece, it's quicker, softer and more washable than batting and backing, so good news all around! 

Autumn reflections doily

Doily name. Autumn reflections doily

Pattern source http://www.crochetmemories.com/blog/autumn-reflections-doily/

Thread arderns crochet cotton size 22 (found in great aunt's workbox)

Hook 1.25mm

Finished doily diameter

Finished doily weight

Comments. This is the second version of this doily. It is much, much faster to do the same doily the second time. This one took about 4hours in total, and I only had to unravel one round because of a mistake.  The first version had at least 4 hours work unravelled in it because I struggle with the written patterns. I think I will have a go at hand drawing charted patterns for any others that I like.

I have quite a few little balls of this size 22 thread, but I'm not sure that I like it. Because it is much finer, it does have a more lacy look, but the thread itself is quite stiff and the finished doily feels scratchy.
The photo shows the doily in Aunt Lydia's cotton.

Doily project gathering pace

The doily project has been gathering steam, helped significantly by the discovery of a website choc a bloc full of charted patterns.  That, and the combination of rainy weather and long train journeys.  All the patterns  I am about to show you (and many more) are available here as charted patterns.

My brain works so much better with charted patterns, I find it so much easier to see where I am going. The only difficulty I had was printing them off in high enough quality that I could count the stitches. I need printed copies, so that I can take them on the train, but also I like to colour the rounds with a highlighter (like this) and tick them off as I go.  The text is all in Russian, so I have no idea what they're called, and the only way I've worked out to link to the individual patterns is to copy them to pinterest first.

All the doilies on this page were made using Aunt Lydia's classic 10 crochet cotton, and a 2mm hook.

This doily was very easy, it is a nice repetitive pattern, and because it is so open, it was very quick to make. It measures 40cm or 15 3/4" across. The first photo shows it after blocking, and the second photo shows it pre-blocking, with another doily from this web page.

The smaller doily is actually just the first seven rounds of a larger pattern.  It measures 14cm across.

This doily is took me from Aberystwyth to Shrewsbury on the train (about 2 hours).  It measures 71/2" or 19.5cm diameter.  Although I like the doily and it was easy to make, you have to cut and rejoin the thread twice, which I didn't like.

These four doilies took the next three hours of my train journey.  Again, they are the centres of larger patterns from the same webpage.

Seven doilies is probably enough for one blog post, but there have been, and will be more from that website.  The football has been on in our house a lot recently.  At least the football is a lot more positive than politics at the moment.

Doily project - Doily 7797

I've made another doily, (not my 7797th unfortunately) but this is the name given to it in the pattern available here.

This is a really pretty doily, which will look far prettier when I can be bother to block it.  (one day...) It’s about 16 inches across.

The pattern is nice and repetitive, so once you have deciphered the instructions it is quite easy to get into the rhythm of each round, and it comes together quite quickly.  However, it would really, really benefit from some charted instructions.  It would have been so much speedier if I hadn’t had to go backwards so many times. I struggled to follow in a few places, so have done some photo instructions and notes here to remind me next time.

General

Terms used are American crochet.

Sc = UK dc (no thread over hook)

Dc= UK tr (1 loop)

Tr= UK dtr (2 loops)

Dtr = 3 loops

Tr tr = 4 loops

Long tr = 5 loops

5^th round

These instructions are a little tricky to follow, but the tr tr should be made into the pinnacle and the space between each petal of the previous round.

9^th Round

I found these instructions particularly difficult to follow, so have done myself a step by step photo tutorial.

“Ch9, holding back on lhook the last loop of each tr tr make 4 tr tr in 6^th chain from hook, thread over and draw through all loops on hook (cluster made)”

Let’s break this down...  First ch9, then make a tr tr in the 6^th chain from hook (in the chain you just made)

When you make the Tr tr, keep the last loop on the hook.  You will see that alongside the initial chain, this looks like two tr tr.

Do this three times more, so you have five in total.

Finally, draw the hook through all loops to form a cluster. The next step in the instructions is “in 5^th chain of next loop make 5-tr tr cluster” So, you make another cluster in the centre chain of the next loop.

After completing the second cluster “ch6, make 4-tr tr cluster in 6^th chain from hook”.  This is similar to the first cluster, you need to make the cluster at the base of the chain you just made.  Once again, the chain will form the 5^th tr tr of the cluster.

The third cluster is anchored to the middle of the next loop of the previous round with a dc “dc in next loop”. 

After this, the instructions are much easier to follow.  “ch9,sc in next loop, ch9, dc in next loop, ch 6. Repeat from * around”.  This last ch6 is the beginning of your next cluster.

The other slightly confusing round is the 19^th round (the last one).  19th rnd: * Skip 3 ch, 11 tr in next ch,

 

sc in next tr, ch 7, sc in next tr, ch 7, turn;

(skip 1 tr, 2 tr tr in next tr, ch 7) 5 times; skip 1 tr, tr tr in next tr, sl st in next tr, ch 1, turn;

 (in next sp make half dc, 7 dc and half dc; sc between next 2 tr tr) 5 times; in next sp make half dc, 7 dc and half dc; sc in next sc, ch 7, sc in next tr.

Repeat from * around. Join and break off

Spring on the building plot

I know I have mentioned it before, but I am so lucky to have an excellent local sewing shop- Aberdashery.  It's not a very big shop, but it is choc-a-bloc full, and almost always has what I've been looking for.  Many a quilting emergency has been saved by the lovely Jane.

Until recently, my 2016 challenge to finish more things than I started was going quite well.  Then the fabric started calling me again!  This gorgeous little Construction strip roll by Fabric Freedom just begged to be bought. I try to resist the ubiquitous pink and blue gender stereotyping in children's products, and originally thought that the little vehicles were tractors, so planned to give it to my farming niece.  However, when I unrolled the fabric I saw that they were diggers. I forgot that machinery is also subject to the colour police - tractors are red, diggers are yellow! Fortunately my little nephew is a huge Bob the builder fan, so I didn't need to look far for a new recipient.

There are just five fabrics in the roll, each repeated four times.  I felt that another yellow fabric was needed to balance it out, so bought this gingham to co-ordinate. 

I wanted the quilt to feel fresh and modern, and toyed with the idea of solid white.  I think it would have looked gorgeous, but not very practical for a gift for a toddler.  I settled on this pale blue instead, and now I can't imagine any other choice.


I followed the Summer in the Park tutorial from Missouri Star Quilt company to make the blocks.  Having never used a pre-cut before, I was so impressed how zippy-quick it went together.  In a couple of afternoons I made 42 blocks, which are 8" squares (7 1/2" finished).

A 6x7 layout would measure 45 x 52.5", which is a generous cuddle quilt, but not quite big enough for a single bed.  As my nephew is only three, I felt that a smaller size would be better, so have two quilts - 5x6 blocks, measuring 37.5" x 45" and a 9x9 layout measuring 67.5" square. I laid the blocks out differently in the two quilt tops.

The smaller quilt top is not finished, and I might add a border.

I wanted the fabrics to be the star of the show (and also wanted it finished quickly), so I chose to stitch in the ditch with my walking foot.  I quilted all the horizontal and vertical seams as well as the main diagonals.  It isn't a lot of quilting, so I hope it's robust enough to withstand toddler use.

There wasn't a suitable green fabric in the shop for binding, so I bought bias binding off the roll.  I won't use it again.  It's too narrow for a quilt, so was a battle to get it on neatly.  I do love the colour though.

I really love the bright cheery spring colours.  I don't think adding in the extra yellow was necessary, but it wasn't a bad choice either. Perhaps because making this quilt tied in with some gorgeous sunny weather, I really love this.

Here is the total list of materials used.
1 Fabric freedom strippers roll (1.25m of fabric)
25cm of yellow gingham
2m of solid blue (there is some left over)
4.5m of pre-made bias binding
1.5m of fleece
A whole 250m reel of thread!