State of stash

This will be the last post for January so I thought I would share with you whether my stash has increased or not during the month.

I have managed to use a total of 11 metres but added a further 7  - so all in all the stash has reduced by 4 metres.  Doesn't sound much but every little helps - if I managed that every month I could have busted nearly 50 metres over the year.

Am off to walk in snowy mountains for a week and will post when I return.

Design inspiration

Having finished the two porjects and not having even ordered the fabric for the two large appplique quilts, I am returning to a hand project that has been ongoing for a while. It is the project I take to my groups and frankly don't do much with in between so this is going to take some time!

It is called "Cornflowers in a cornfield" and is all hand sewn.
Here is a close up

The small circle in the middle is about 1/4" across.

When one is seriously challenged on the design front with lack of drawing skills, you have to invent other means of finding designs and the inspiration for this quilt was my ironing board cover. You can see the pattern of the large flower in the centre.

Challenge quilt

The BQL challenge quilt is finished. It measures 12" x 18" and once again proves that I really can't draw at all.  But I thoroughly enjoyed doing the machine thread work and hope that someone will want to swap it. It could end up anywhere in the world or - if no-one likes it enough, I will be hanging it on my wall!  It is based on the view out of my office - up near the roof of the houses opposite there is a branch which I have attempted to copy

Here is my original sketch (told you I can't draw)

I even managed to find some wood effect fabric in my stash

Then I added the leaves

The quilting was all done with a varidated brown thread for the branches and twigs and a pale green on the leaves.

and here is a detail

Two finishes in one weekend - I feel I need to go and lie down in a darkened room to recover.

One down, a million to go

The pink quilt is finished - yesterday the binding went on and the quilt was washed and laid out for drying - I will leave it on the floor for two or three days so that it comes up totally square. I did put it in the tumble dryer until it was damp.

I can't claim credit for the design as I used elements from the books by Piece of Cake   Designs . The recipient of this quilt asked for a pink quilt and she certainly got one! The main background in pieced in 9" squares and 9" x 18" rectangles.  The green border is 1 1/2" x 6" blocks and the outer border is 3" squares. All the quilting is by hand - the applique pieces are quilted in a variegated Steph Francis thread - pink/red/purple for the flowers and a variegated green for the leaves.  The background is quilted in a variegated pink thread.

I still have not chosen a name for the quilt - "Pink Bouquet" or "Claudia's Bouquet" are front runners at the moment but I will ponder on it some more. It is her university quilt so I have a while before I have to sew on the label and give it to her.

I have to go and start my challenge quiltlet for the BQL challenge (BQL is a yahoo group of mainly British Quilters but with lots of quilters from overseas as well).- lots of other people have already posted their efforts and I have had to give up looking at them - they are all so good and it is easy to become distracted by what you see and think "oh yes - I could do something like that" and then you end up not thinking for yourself. The challenges before were easy as you just posted photographs when they were finished but this one is really scary as you are able to vote for your favourite five and then hopefully you will be chosen to receive that - yes we are actually swapping quilts! And you could be swapping with someone from the other side of the world.

Enough prevaricating I must get on. Hopefully you will see the results tomorrow.

I got this link from the Stashbusters goupr http://stashmanicure.blogspot.com/2010/10/welcome-to-my-underwear-drawer.ht - just in case you are thinking of re-organising your stash - imagine the fabric she could have bought with price of the boxes.

Inspiration

A good day is one when a new quilting magazine drops on the mat. Definitely time for a cup of coffee and a good read.  This month's Quilters Newsletter is a brilliant one and I have only managed to read a few pages so far.

My dilemna is almost over - I have decided to go ahead and order the dark blue fabric - now my only problem is to choose the shade. I am going to take the design to my quilt group on Friday and discuss it further. I also will buy the background for the McLean Roseville quilt.

Now I am off to teach my group and have to do some more ironing in preparation. They are all doing so well and in a few weeks time we should have two of them quilting up their quilts a storm.

Dilemna

There is a beautiful block of the month that I badly want to start - it's huge and full of lots of applique. The last quilt I made by this designer I offered to my local church and school as the major raffle prize at the summer fair. I managed to complete the entire quilt out of stash and so only had to pay for the longarm quilting - my own machine quilting is really not good and I did not want to ruin what was promising to be a beautiful piece. Anyway I was happy to do it and thankfully it raised quite a lot of money for a good cause.

Now I have a problem - the new design needs 11 yards of background fabric. I think I can fudge all the applique and pieced block colours from my stash but the quilt is designed with a dark background - shown in black but I think dark blue would be better.(The overall theme is winter and Christmas)  Question is do I spend a shed load of money on all that fabric or do I just collect the pattern month by month and make the quilt sometime never.

I was hoping not to spend too much on supplies this year but that could get blown out of the window with this quilt.

Not to mention the other applique quilt I want to start which needs another 10 metres background as well.

So I will go and do some hand sewing and contemplate.

Here is a picture of my stash in the workroom - enough to make a few more quilts I think!

scrap quilt

This is a small quilt that I made using the quarter square triangle ruler from Creative Grids. All the fabric came from my stash of 2 1/2" strips. It is a great way to use up one colour of your strips. The blue one are in the ongoing half square triangle quilt and I have a pink one with 60 degree triangles started as well.

I am now off to iron all the fabrics I bought yesterday.

I am getting a few quilt tops together at the moment as I am going to buy a new Bernina in the summer and will need lots of practice at machine quilting - they will not be big quilts but again will use up my stash and can be given away as charity quilts at the end of the day.

I am also trying to keep a tally of the amount of fabric I use this year so that I can calculate whether the stash has decreased over the year. So far the pink quilt has used 8 metres of fabric. The calculation I am using is length x width of quilt top + 20% for seam allowances, divided by 40 and then divided by 39. I have added a further metre for the applique and binding. At least that is more than I bought yesterday!!