Work in progress

It's less than a month to Christmas Day and I'm already late with my presents. Thankfully I have had a moment of cleverness and planned only one self made present: a quilt for my grandparents.
Here is a photo of my work in progress:

It will be a bowtie quilt and right now this is my favourite layout. There are still a few blocks to sew to make it a nice size. I'm not quite sure how to proceed though.
Should I sew rows or should I first sew x and o blocks and than sew into rows?
Moreover I have to think of a quilting design. I could do an allover meandering design, but I was thinking to try something new this time. First of all I hope it makes the quilt more special and second I think the orange turned out to be less subdued than expected. So I was thinking to quilt the orange parts in a dense pattern and only to outline the other parts to make them pop out more.
Let's see.

Flower Prism Quilt

Even before I had finished my first quilt I could not resist the temptation to plan the next project (and to procrastinate). Those who know me know of my love for bold and flowery patterns. There are so many beautiful fabrics available, especially reprints of old 30s fabric and new fabric in retro style. So I bought lots of them. A really great way to show of these fabrics is by making large blocks. Squares are too boring so I decided for the beautiful (and free) Patchwork Prism pattern by Anna Maria Horner.Cutting the fabric took ages, but that's the point about procrastinating ;)
Here I made a first layout of the blocks. Sorry for the poor quality, there are so little bright hours now and there's a lot of raining.

If you're interested in this pattern you can find it here and a video with Anna Maria Horner giving tips for the pattern here.

Stash Note #1

This is the first time I ever bought a fat quarter bundle. I simply fell in love with the "Indie" collection by Pat Bravo. Maybe it's because of the unconventional combination of colours and patterns, I can't put my finger on it.

I had bought this to make a patchwork bag out of it, but the fabric is such a fine quality it would be a shame to use it for a heavy used item such as a weekender bag. So I pulled some fabrics out of my stack that might make a quilt when added to the Indie fabrics.

 I welcome any advise about adding/ deleting fabric from this stack!

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!