June 2020

Lockdown has been eased a bit, so back to playing golf and a bit less sewing. I have made another scrap box quilt, three in total for Linus. This one was stitched onto wadding squares, the blocks were stitched together with a very dark navy sashing (1/2 inch), then a backing added and quilted in the ditch either side of the sashing. A 1/4 inch dark navy binding finished it off. I can at least put the lids on my 2 scrap boxes, still got a lot of scraps to use up.

 At the end of May, I decided to take part in the Lullingstone Quilt show challenge 'Two Fabrics'. The brief is to make a quilt 16 inches wide and up to 40 inches long. I chose silk and cotton, as that's what I had to hand. I like Jennie Rayment's textural blocks and have made several small quilts using her techniques. I chose three blocks to make from my silk and cotton. The cotton was a batik (chosen because it included colours similar to the plain fabrics) and hand-dyed voile and poplin, with a small amount of mustard cotton. The silks were from 'The Silk Route' Theme packs, so approx 10 inch squares. It is simply quilted in the ditch either side of the sashing, and around the silk shapes. I added some beads, buttons, sequins and embroidery thread embellishments. This is the result, which I was very pleased with. The colours are brighter than the photo, which seems a bit pink as the wall is painted in a colour similar to clotted cream.

Lullingstone Challenge Quilt - W 15 x L 39 inches

This is one of the garments I have been making since getting back into clothes making. I altered the neck opening, as I have made it before and found the neck V was easily damaged.

Loose tunic for summer wear

Here is a picture of the Easy Stack quilt I mentioned in my last post.

Lastly, this Crazy Paving quilt (started at evening classes with Nita Dodd) has been a UFO for 11 years, but is now complete. It uses a stack and cut technique, with 9 different squares of fabric that you rotary cut into 9 trapezoid patches. These are then arranged into blocks using one patch of each fabric. The finished are blocks are 10.5 inches square, so the fabric squares were probably 12 inches. I made three sets of crazy paving squares and used 27 in this quilt. The other three ended up as a table runner, which I use a lot. The quilt is backed with a pale blue cotton sheet (single) so no joins on the back. It is quilted in the ditch between the blocks and around the centre trapezoid in each block. I think the blue sashing and batik border set it off nicely. Except for the backing, all the fabric came from my stash.

Crazy Paving quilt