Quilt N°1 - finished!

Finally! I have finished my first Quilt! (And I took a lot of photos of it ;) )

It was a great experience to make a quilt. There are so many steps in the making:

This year I started sewing with a few totes. Then I came across some fabric I liked and bought just for the look of it (the robots in green and blue). I browsed the internet for some more bag tutotials and came across Jessica's blog How About Orange. You know how it goes: I clicked here and there and ended up on Elizabeth's blog Oh, Fransson!. Elizabeth makes modern quilts and is great at explaining techniques. Her modern quilts were a real eye-opener. Here in Germany quilts are not so common and I only knew these that are made with batik fabrics. I admired their craft(wo)manship but I could not imagine me making a quilt like those. With these modern quilts however I felt that they were the perfect creative hobby for me. 

I bought Elizabeth's book "the practical guide to patchwork" and picked the "small plates" pattern. Now I could get started with my favourite part of the project: the choice of fabrics. I started only in blues and greens, added some browns until I came upon Lotta Jansdotter fabrics in beautiful orange. I decided to add orange to the brown stack and found the most beautiful (and most expensive) fabric to complete this stack:  Birch by Ink & Spindle in saffron. For the solid I used some great shot cotton by oakshott (by the way: They changed their online shop so now you can see the prices also in US$ and €).

Remember: this was all around Easter. By the end of June I had finished the blocks and decided for a layout. And then? - Well, for a long time there happened nothing. I had a lot of work to do (the money earning kind), other projects (birthdays!) and I did not quite know how to proceed. If you check the photo where I did the layout you can see, that the squares were no proper squares. That happened because my first (very cheap) sewing machine did neither have a 1/4" foot nor a walking foot and I was not experienced enough to manage anyway. I tried to sew rows but it turned out uneven. Hence I had to use my best friend the seam ripper quite a lot before I could go on.
Moreover I did not want my quilt to be the first piece to have a try at the techniques needed. Hence I made the placemats and baby quilts first - more time gone.
These summer holidays finally gave me the time needed to finish the quilt top and this autumn I managed to quilt and finish it - yeah!!!

It took a lot longer than anticipated by me but it was so much fun! There are already a few more projects in planning (even fabric bought and cut).
Today was glorious weather and I had to grab this opportunity to take a lot of photos of the finished quilt. Beware!

At our "Golden Gate Bridge"

 

With horses

  

The back

soup with red lentils

This recipe was given to me by a colleage. It's really yummy, affordable, quick and vegan.

For two persons you will need:
1         onion
100g   carrots
200g   red lentils
0,75l   vegetable broth
0,25l   coconut milk
1 tbs.  ginger
1        hot pepper (red)
1        bay leaf
2 tsp. curry

Note: Feel free to experiment with the amounts of ingredients. I use more ginger, carrots and lentils. It's also nice to add a squirt of lemon juice.

Chop the onion, carrots, ginger and hot pepper. Sweat these in rapeseed (or sunflower) oil in a large pot. Add lentils, broth and spices. Boil up shortly and let it simmer for about 10-15min.
Take the bay leaf out, add the coconut milk and puree shortly.

Two Baby Quilts

Last Weekend we visited our friends Björn and Sandra with their kids Justus and Iris at their new built house in Wesel. They were really good hosts (as always). We ate way too much pizza and played games until long into the night (as always). Several of our friends have bought or even built houses recently. We liked Björns and Sandras best so far. The proportions and dimensions of the rooms were very thought-out. Moreover the house was built with materials and techniques that it uses only about 70% of the energy a conventionally built house needs.

In contrast to my previous post I like to sew baby quilts as long as I can give them away. I have not written about it yet but I have been queen bee for sew.quilt.give in august. Due to customs duty I have to wait quite a long time for the blocks to arrive. Since patience is not one of my stronger streaks I decided to make baby quilts for Justus and Iris using the same pineapple log cabin block tutorial as for the quilting bee.

I used mostly scraps from other projects. 

Quilt for Iris

Quilt for Justus

I was in a hurry and thus opted for straight line quilting. I like the way it turned out.

Placemats

As you might know I'm currently working on my first quilt. The problem with a project such as this is that it requires the use of several techniques otherwise not needed.

So I searched the internet for tutorials and found many. Almost all of them suggested to make sample pieces to practice the particular technique. 

Well, I don't like to make something without a use but to practice (or decorate for that matter) so I went looking for alternatives. I found a lot of mini-quilts (-> decoration problem) or baby-quilts (-> too much work for something that might not turn out well) until I stumbled upon quilted placemats. They were perfect for my purpose: small enough to avoid too much work, large enough to practice techiques and with a proper use!

Ever since I bought Elizabeth Hartman's book "The Practical Guide to Patchwork" the "Batch of Brownies" pattern had caught my eye. I figured that it would be easy to adopt the size of the blocks to make a placemat (and it was; just keep the seam allowances in mind that you have to add for every cut made).

I had already "Kitchen Stories" by Hoodie in my stack, one of those fabrics bought for the looks without any purpose in mind. I combined it with a curry solid I cannot remember the name of.

So this was the first project I used following techniques:

• making a quilt sandwich
• straight-line quilting
• FMQ (free-motion quilting)
• binding a quilt (I still have to practice the corners, they did not turn out well)

All in all it was a good project for practice an now we have some new placemats.
Actually I made these a few weeks ago and by now I have quilted my Quilt N°1:

 And now I have to use my placemats for the first time. I'm starving!

Yay

Sewing for birthdays II

How does it happen that nearly all birthdays in our families accumulate in two months?

Tino's sister Maike also has her birthday in august. Her colours are rose and brown and she loves Paris. Hence the new Paris fabric by Westfalenstoffe was just the perfect choice for her. I added two other fabrics in rose and brown also by Westfalenstoffe of the classic line. This line is produced for over 75 years and it still has a modern feel to it (e.g. compare it to summerville).

For the pattern I modified this fabulous lunch-bag-pattern by wonderful Ayumi of Pink Penguin. 

I will not re-write this tutorial but I can say a few words about the modifications I made. First of all I started with larger rectangles around 12"x16" (30cm x 40cm) and adjusted the other sizes accordingly. 

For the handles I made 4 fabric strips the same way as for handles in the tutorial by Ayumi. I also made them long enough to be also fastened at the bottom of the rim (I figured that would make them more stable). It's a bit awkward to sew with the wooden handle connected to the rim. You have to do a lot of adjusting and pushing of the fabric. In most steps a zipper foot is very helpfull.

 Tino bought Maike two fluffy toy guinea pigs by Steiff. Don't they look adorable?

Unwanted Legacies

Even though WWII is long over there still are legacies that remind us of that time. In Munich they found an old bomb and had to detonate it. Several houses burned and many more are uninhabitable now.

Here in Münster the legacies are not that spectacular. Like in many other towns in Germany streets and places were named after "heroes" of WWI and the German Empire. During the last decades historical research has looked more critically into these persons which caused towns to rename many streets and squares. Münster was a bit on the slower side in this topic but this year the city council decided to rename the largest square in town from "Hindenburgplatz" to "Schlossplatz" (palace square).

Hindenburg was Chief of the General Staff of the German Reich in WWI and became President of Germany in 1925. It was him who appointed Adolf Hitler Chancellor of Germany. Hence he was not the kind of person a modern city wants its main square to be named after. So far so good. 

Unfortunately there are still many people around who are ignorant of the past. For reasons incomprehensible to me it are the young and ambitious (young politicians of the JU) who put a lot of effort into campaigning for the old name. At the end of the day we are having a vote on the name. I could think of a lot of better ways to spend tax money. 

You can read a good summary why you should vote NEIN-NO on "Hindenburgplatz" by Carsten Keßler here.

 

PS: I'm still waiting for the day the city will rename the "Lüderitzweg".