Tag: Stippling

I love my job!

Each freezing winter morning over the past week, I’ve reluctantly rolled out of bed with a heavy sigh, blasted my self with a welcoming stream of hot water in the shower, eaten my toast and then drunk a mug of delightful green tea – all to prepare myself for a wonderful day of sewing! With a skip, jump and a beaming smile I immerse myself into my wonderful world of fabrics, threads, needles and scissors!

First of all, I finished my friends Butterfly Cot Quilt and sent it out earlier this week. Beautiful baby Alena Grace was born 26th June and is just the sweetest little thing ever! A BIG congratulations to the proud Mumma and her family!!

I’m so thrilled with how well the Stippling came out and how it adds character and depth to the over-all theme of the quilt. Yay!

It’s July! Which means with a new month comes two new Craftsy BOMs! This month was discovering how to do traditional and modern Dresden Plates or Wheels.

I have done a few Dresdens before in the past but it’s always handy to see how others tackle them – with no doubt you always end up learning something new!

Progress is definitely happening with the How Does Your Garden Grow? competition quilt. It’s coming together a lot faster than I had anticipated but that’s always a good thing, I guess.

I’ve set myself a goal to finish hand piecing together the quilt top by the end of the day – even that means sitting up until midnight!

As always, to feed my constant need to continuously start something new, I dug out of my stash a Charm Pack that I’ve being dying to find a use for and started to cut and sew them into HST ready to piece them together to either make a chevron inspired table runner or door hanging….

The fabrics are from a Moda range called Half Moon Modern. I loved the colours and prints as soon as I saw them. I’m giddy with excitement for the finished product!

Now it’s time to turn the heater on, pour myself a nice cuppa, insert a good DVD and finish hand piecing my competition quilt. Here’s to a productive afternoon – or should I say ‘crafter-noon’!

Happy Sewing!! xx

In love with progress!

I love a good dose of progress in any way possible and the past few days have been full of it!

I’ve come to the point where I’ve almost, just almost, finished the Butterfly cot quilt and I’m so-so-so-so-so happy with it!

While finishing this little beauty, I tried out two techniques that I’ve always shied away from: spray basting and free-hand quilting (stippling).

First of all: I thought I’d give spray basting a go as I knew that safety-pins would constantly get in the way while I was trying to free-hand quilt. So I bought a small can, sprayed away (following the instructions of course!) and was dumb-founded with the instant results I got. My god, the stuff truly does work!

It’s not too sticky but sticky enough to hold all three layers to one another, it’s repositionable and it doesn’t gum up the sewing machine needle. These were my fears of using spray baste but I was happily proven wrong. Plus it only took like two seconds to baste the whole quilt together compared to a few hours rolling around on the floor, pinning and stabbing yourself while tackling all three layers together.

The next technique I successfully conquered was free-hand quilting or stippling. At first I was hopeless and was having terrible issues with the tension – all of my stitches were too loose and it looked horrible and messy. But with YouTube and the Missouri Star Quilt Company to the rescue, I was able to remedy my troubles by changing the tension (very high or tight!) to achieve beautiful, clean and crisp stitching. Here’s the link to the YouTube clip http://youtu.be/yGNOS5JQHYQ Check it out as they go over how to spray baste, set up your machine for stippling and do a little demonstration. They do talk a lot, but it’s helpful if you don’t know what you’re doing!

Here is the quilt on it way! A minute into it I had to stop to have a look and see if I was doing it right, and HUZZAH, it was working!!

Now I’m not going to show you a whole finished look of the quilt just yet – I want to wait until it’s reached the ‘mum-to-be’ before I do that. But here are a few sneaky-peeks!

So from one quilt, onto another…. Today I begun cutting and piecing together another project for a friend who bought some adorable Gumnut Babies fabric. I’ve had these fabrics sitting in my to-do pile for the last 3-4 months, so I thought it was about time to get it started! This lovely lady has been ever so patient and tolerant with my poor time management skills!

Here’s a peek at the fabrics just before they were pieced together this morning.

I also managed to finish my babushka embroidery that I started over my horrible sickie weekend.

It’s just so sweet and colourful. I’m not too sure whether I’ll just frame it or if I’ll add a border around it to make it into a little wall-hanging. I’ve got some adorable babushka print fabric I’ve had sitting in my stash for a gazillion years that I’m just itching to use!

Last but not least, two days ago I decided to quit my job and take up quilting, patchwork, crafting, and blogging as my ‘full-time’ career. It was decision that I didn’t make lightly but felt that it was a now or never kind of feeling/situation. Quilting is my life and my deepest passion and I couldn’t think of anything else in this world that I could commit myself to to make me happy and content in life.

I have sat down and written out a full list of goals I want to achieve and know that I will accomplish them with hard work and dedication along with support and encouragement from my family and friends. I’ll also be taking this time to finish my Fine Arts degree with the plan to go on to studying Education so I can teach my craft to others!

So that’s been my week: busy, stressful, teary, successful, content and intense! Hmm.

Happy Sewing! xx