comfortstitching

monday habits

I finished sewing the binding on a couple more mini quilts to hang up behind my computer, the block used for the one above is called ducks foot and I will definitely be playing with this one again.

This one is the good old shoofly, I've never shooflied before but I definitely want to shoofly again too.

I loved playing around with the quilting on this one, I really wish I had a bigger sewing table so I could do this kind of thing on larger quilts without the palaver.

Here they are hanging out with the other minis, nothing really goes together with anything else but somehow that's the point.

My little work cubby is looking so much cosier, which is a good job because I'm spending most of my day here today catching up after my little bug holiday.

Keeping me company today, is this little box of fabric scraps.  I always need to be in whiffing distance of fabric especially if I can't sew all day, it keeps me working hard so I can earn a little sewing time later this week.

I'd much rather be sat here though beside my new daffs on MY sofa - do you do the MY sofa thing in your house too?  you know the one the kiddies must vacate if you walk in the room with a cup of tea ready to sit down?

Lastly, on Friday I had to grit my teeth and take a deep breath whilst I frogged about 20 rows of this baby.  I'd messed up a few rows earlier on and they were becoming more and more obvious the more I progressed.  Luckily things went smoothly and my little cowl is looking so much healthier.  A few more days and I should be done :)

tuesday

Today I am sitting in my workspace not feeling quite with it due to the company of a few unfriendly ailments from the land of lurgy.  I'm attempting to ignore my flakiness due to illness and am determined to get stuff done, hence the messy-ish piles of paper and books, calculations being checked, sums worked out, to do lists being crossed off, new to do lists being written up even faster (all in very scruffy hand writing).

Brightening up my day today is my growing wall of mini's on the wall behind my computer screen, including a new addition!

A little 'a is for apple' mini from amanda's project in this book (made from Little Apples of course and a couple of comprades).  I knew I wanted to make this quilt from my fabric as soon as I saw it in the book, just took me a little time to, you know get there.

To quilt, I topstitched around the apples and added a few mini rows of quilted circles (some are considerably messier than the one above).

I love this mini collection of mini's!  The more I make the more I want to make!!

winter woolies

Sometimes I need a little challenge to branch out of that comfort zone I like being all snuggled up in.  Super scary sounding paper piecing is not at home in that comfort zone, not at all.  Beautiful to look at but frightening to contemplate, or so I thought.

Cue Kerry and her Winter Woolies pattern.  Kerry does all the hard work for you, so all you have to do is cut out the pattern and sew on the lines and then you can say 'I did this all by myself' (except you know Kerry helped you really with her wise words, hint's, tips and explanations but you don't need to tell everybody that do you?)

Lots of tea was drunk, a wind up santa was played (c'mon, you know you would too) with and in the space of ONE day, I'd done this....

Made a picture, pieced from fabric and felt very clever indeedy.

Fabrics used are - For the woolies - Sweater check from my Little Apples and a Denyse Schmidt print from Picnics and Fairgrounds.  Background - Urban Grid from City Weekend by Oliver and S for Moda.  Binding - Button Stripe from Little Apples.

Remember the work corner station of my front room I showed you last week? (the one next to the mock fireplace).   I've decided this patch of wall needs a mini quilt injection (so I have something to while away the hours at staring when I really should be working).

Three quilts down, I'd say about seven more to go.

Lots more seasonal decs and sewing to come this week................stay tuned!

a quilted house

This post could also have been called piles of quilts around my house.

It is made under the guise of a little mini tour around my home with pit stops wherever there is a quilt in sight.  The first stop on the quilting tour bus is the section of the house known as 'the toy room'.  This makes my house sound bigger and posher than it could ever dream to be but as you can perhaps make out from the weirdly angled pics, my home is pretty much titchy.  The toy room is in fact the third (smallest) bedroom and decorating the walls on this side are a couple of swap quilts I received a couple of years ago as well as my 'loopy frog prince mini'*

*If you want a closer look at any of the quilts in this post you can find the links here.

On the opposite side of the wall hangs my 'Bedtime story quilt' and just around the corner of those brown drawers we have..

a little mini quilt I made using all the colourways of the scoot print from pips. 

On the chest of drawers we have my 'scrap it up' quilt.

And to the left of the top photo are a few embroideries made by my eldest daughter (she is developing quite the stitchy habit).

In the girls room, these quilts either live on a little green stool or when the little green stool is busy they get piled up onto a bed (or most usually flung onto the floor..).

From the top - 'Dresden love story', 'Crazy scrappy quilt', 'blocky munki' and 'Geese in the middle'

This pile facing the girls beds includes (from top) 'scrappy trip around the world on a shoestring','pink sketch', 'magenta diamonds', 'liberty half hexagon' and 'scraptastic coin'

In to my bedroom, on the wall facing my bed are (from left) a mini I made with an embroidery received in a swap, 'geese in the city' and 'quilters boat' 

Facing the window is 'skipity pickledish'.

And this big huge pile now lives on table in my bedroom - two crocheted numbers, 'watercolour spiderweb', 'urban daydreams', 'true blue' and 'spring umbrella (and on the bed is my pickledish).

On the top of the bookshelf in the front room (no space or corner is safe in my house) there are a scrappy stars quilt (not finished or blogged yet), 'hoopla fancy', a little apples quilt and an unfinished christmas quilt.

I would say 'and lastly, these mini pips tree quilts hang by the front door' but even as I write this post I have remembered three four quilts I have forgotten to put include here.

Not bad for three years quilting but I do wonder what my house might look like in another three - quilted front door perhaps?????

the girl on the tree swing

This is the story of how the girl on the tree swing came to be.  

It began in the autumn of 2009 when I found myself doodling a few pictures of girls on swings.  I have 2 daughters as you may know, age 7 and 10 and consequently have spent many hours in a variety of parks pushing my daughters on one swing or another for several hours at a time.  As you may know, once a young child gets their little bottom onto the seat of a swing, it stays there superglued  until you come up with a clever distraction.  I always think that I have never seen my daughters happier than when they have been sat swinging away to their hearts content.  So back to the sketching, it wasn't going well as the swings looked kind of clunky and angular until I 'married' two of my favourite things to doodle, girls on swings and trees!!!

Around this time, I was really wanting to try out a few stitching techniques I had seen online.  I was really inspired by this doll quilt of Tacha's and thought my girl on the tree swing image would be a perfect one to try something similar in.  So I came up with the girl the tree swing mini quilt you can see above which I then came up with the idea of giving away. 

I don't know why but it did seem a good idea at the time.

The giveaway and the quilt were very popular, I think that there is something so sweetly idyllic in the tree swing image that we all identify with either ourselves or when we see our own daughters happily swinging away.  It takes us to a place we all want to be.  So by popular request, I decided to write a tutorial for the quilt.  Above are just a few of the quilts made by others using the tutorial, posted in my flickr group.

A few months later, I thought it might be a good idea to recreate the tree swing image (and keep it for myself this time!).  I was in an embroidery mood this time, so my girl was recreated in stitch.  One of the striking things for me looking at this embroidery now is how carefree and dreamy it looks.  I say this because when I was stitching this up, I was in a lot of pain (I later found out that this was due to a bladder infection - not nice at all).  It's funny to think how the embroidery completely belies the pain I was in.

If you are interested, I have a tutorial for making the filling stitch in this embroidery here.  The girl on the tree swing embroidery pattern can be found here.

This embroidery has been so popular ever since I launched it, that I thought where else can I take this?  The answer of course was fabric!

First there were spoonflower prints, these were handrawn and coloured illustrations of mine scanned into the computer, with just the background added in windows 'paint'.

Then came (or will come soon!) the Moda fabric - 'girl on a tree swing print from my 'Sherbet pips' collection.

One thing I love about this print is the way Moda printed it.  When I designed the print (you can see a cropped image of my original illustrator artwork in the banner at the top of this blog) it was made up of two girls swinging, one with a red dress and the other blue.  Moda decided to repeat some of the images as mirror images and this is what makes the fabric itself 'swing' (look at the fabric and see how those little girls all look like they are in motion!) very clever.  Another thing they did was to change the hair and dress colours of the different images across the print.  Surely one of these reminds you of a little girl you know?

As for the girl on the tree swing, you just never know where she might turn up next...........

fan(tastic) tree quilt

I think this one is my favourite tree quilt mini so far.

Definitely.

I have always wanted to make a fan type tree block ever since Katy made this dreamy one for the Ten Make Two Bee a year or two ago.  For a while I hoped someone else would make one for me and added Katy's pic every time I made a flickr swap inspiration mosaic, wilfully wanting one to magically appear.

But in the end, I had to do it myself.

I didn't use a pattern or paper piecing but just winged it.  Adding each piece where I thought it should go. I was very tempted to hang a little tree swinging girl off the tree but decided it might make it OTT.

And so the little wall forest of the future grows.  I think may be two more and I'll be done (is 5 a forest?).

Hope you are up to some good quilty fun too?! 

lickable lolly quilt

This is the second in my 'mini series' of tree quilts for the wall forest to be.  Inspired by my love of 'zoom' lollies, which is what stripy ice lollies are called in the UK. I'd love to know the name for them in your very own neck of the woods.  

So actually it has ended up looking more lolly and less tree in my opinion.

But I still love it.

One of the absolute benefits of making these kinds of mini's is that they are so much easier to quilt.  This is the kind of carefree free motion quilting I would love to try on a big quilt.

I hope you all have something fun planned for the weekend.

I'll be playing with these babies................

little trees

          

I like BIG quilts.  Big quilts are the business for snuggling under and hiding from the cold.  But big quilts can be a huge operation to mastermind in the making particularly if you, like me, turn your front room into a sewing studio by day and living quarters by evening.  Sometimes I get tired of trying to hide all the STUFF that goes into big quilts.  At times like this I start to think about making small quilts.  Small quilts are pretty useless as quilts unless you want to keep one hand warm (at a time) but they make excellent make overs for walls everywhere in need of a little dressing up.  Small quilts are particularly useful to hang up and stare at whilst cosying up under a big quilt.

This little small quilt is what I was making when I wrote this post (yes, wayyyyyyy back).  It took a long time to actually get the binding on because life's like that.

Now, all I need to do is finish off (stitch the binding on) a few other little quilts with trees on and I can show you my very own little fabric wall forest (every wall should have one).

Bet you can't wait?????

 

playing with the pips

I have had a little time to spare in the past couple of weeks, so of course I had to spend it hanging out with my new babies 'The pips'.  

When I designed this collection, I had to imagine the way it would all work, co-ordinate or gel (for want of better vocabulary), in my head.  But in truth, I didn't really know how it would all look once cut up and sewn.  I was really just crossing my fingers and hoping that they would all be friends, balance out each others weaknesses (the way good friends do) and we could all live happily ever after in my little patchwork heaven.

So finally, the moment of truth has arrived....................

What do you think?????

a little seasoning

I've finally finished up my items for my partner in the savvy seasons swap on flickr.

I enjoyed playing around with all these yummy christmassy fabrics even though we are only just into October. Of course as I stitched, my own list of bits of quilty cheer I intend to stitch up before Christmas grew and grew and grew..........

But enough about that, here is a closer look at what the above actually is....

a patchworked and quilty.....

...table runner,

Lots of pretty little fun details in those squares.

A seasonal mug rug, inspired by the mug rug explosion on flickr.

And a little katie jump rope christmas tree pincushion as I'm sure my partner will be stitching something over the holiday period.

Now as for tommorow....

I am very excited to announce...

A preview!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

DON'T MISS IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!