quilt – Mixy's Art Blog

Hi Folks!

Lordy, where has the time gone since I last posted….? I’ve missed our chats.

Student life is going from strength to strength – initial doubts replaced by a deep joy of the challenges. This week has been ‘reading week’ so college was closed, I’ve caught up on the day job & finally replaced my creaky 8 yr old computer in the office. In the odd moments in between I’ve been busy-ing on the quilt which has grown dramatically since I last showed you….

Also I got myself some Easy Batik I plan to play with this weekend – I’ll show you how it goes – I’m intrigued!! I also found out we can do real batik in school, and am super excited about this!

More soon… 😀

Cosy Snugness, in the making

A little while ago I told you about my plan to make a quilt.

So far I’ve completed 9 5×5 squares……

I started by recycling a quilt I made years ago, stripping it down for usable fabric, but there wasn’t going to be enough to complete the project.

I scoured boot sales, charity shops and my wardrobe for possible cut-up-able clothing, and finally the shop-that-sells-everything came up trumps with 2 large offcuts of pink cotton velvet.

Although pink isn’t a color I plan to use, but I chose it for it’s 2 very easy options: + yellow = orange, and + blue = purple.

These arrived at the end of last week, so the weekend was dying time!

It has a certain wonky appeal, which I put down to IK‘s aversion to ironing.

More precisely, IK’s aversion to clearing space to set up the ironing board. Coupled with the memory of a sewing time many years ago when I let IK iron on the carpet instead of the ironing board. It didn’t end well for the carpet.

We ironed some pieces today (properly), they look much better for it. We agreed the ironing board should be left up while construction stage is still in progress! 😉

Quilt update

Although I’m still painting and all – this quilt is obsession de jour. There’s a real autumnal feel in the air the last couple of days – so stitching away!

Having trimmed, washed, de-fluffed and thoroughly considered my stacks of velvet patches I deceid the best way forward would be to take the smallest length and cut all the other patches to this size.

(First use of the rotary cutter – it you use fabric a lot and don’t have one I highly recommend trying it out.) I’ve now got a good size pile of offcuts which I can see are just waiting for a project of their own…!

Experimental layouts, fluff induced sneezing. You’ll see there’s quite a bit of fluff and threads on the fabric – I battled with it a while, but it keeps coming back while there are unfinished edges!

The patches are 9cm (3 and a bit inches) square, in 5 x 5 squares. Each of these squares takes about 30 mins to machine together (inc time for fiddling about. The pile of 2 velvets together makes the patches ‘walk’ a bit. Some of them take a bit of battling with!)

I’ve machined 8 of these squares now, and begun hand embroidering over the machine stitching in places. Relieved to report the fluff levels are subsiding too!

Quilty Time

See what I did there? *snigger*

September’s just round the corner and me and the Inner Kid are looking forward to some cosiness. We reeeeeally want a velvet quilt in which to snuggle.

Now, something like 15 years ago we made one. It was a patchwork of scavanged velvet from car boot sales and charity shops, excuses, impatience and scant attention to detail. I didn’t have such a balanced relationship with IK back then, so handed over almost all the decision making, which culminated in a lovely colorful quilt, full of hurried inaccuracies, apology and shonky stitching. It began to develop holes almost straight away.

Fast forward another 10 years or so: We decide to re-incarnate/up-cycle said quilt into covers for floor cushions. Some long while after this they ended up in that limbo of ‘waiting for next idea’ space. The ragbag. The months of scavanging fabric, sorting and choosing, cutting into squares, sneezing from the fluff were so long past, but still fresh enough that we couldn’t totally let go.

Fast forward again to yesterday: I left IK sleeping off the excitement of the previous day and snuck upstairs with scissors and freshly washed quilt/cushion cover remnants.

Sssssshhhhh…. don’t tell, but I actually began trimming down the pieces to the same size (yes, measured not guessed)…. layed them out on the (ironed) backing fabric and pinned them. Just like a proper grown up would do!!!

I’ll post up some picks as we go along – meanwhile IK is yelling in the background: I have to paint the dream I just woke from. QUICK before it escapes!