21 July 2017

EPP Hexagon Kindle Cover

I love to read and while I much prefer 'real' books, I do like to load up my kindle for holidays and travelling.  While browsing Pinterest I saw several pictures of patchwork covers and thought I would have a go at making one.

I had a mini charm pack of Kate Spain fabrics that I picked up on sale, they are the perfect size to cover 1" hexagon papers. I carried my tin of hexagons and pieces around with me while visiting friends, and just kept joining hexagons until I had a piece about the size of A4 paper


I enjoyed piecing this and finished it several weeks ago, realising that we leave for France in a couple of days, I thought I better get on with actually making it into something!

I found a scrap of batting in my stash and a cute piece of fabric for the lining


I machine stitched in the ditch down the length of the piece and then trimmed it down to 8" x 13"


added binding all round and folded up the bottom to make a pocket; I stitched on a couple of pieces of velcro to keep it closed





all ready to go en vacances :)

15 July 2017

Daisy Do

The problem with tidying your fabric stash, is that you rediscover all your favourite fabrics and quickly abandon tidying in favour of starting a new quilt, or is that just me? 🤣

I bought this book 'Quilt Lovely' by Jen Kingwell a few months back, I normally like a muted palette but lately I have found myself drawn to these clear happy fabrics that Jen and other Australian designers favour.



I particularly liked the cover quilt 'Daisy Do'



I think it will look fabulous in some of my Liberty fabrics, mixed with others pulled from my stash



 so I bought the acrylic templates


There are templates in the book, but I like these acrylic ones as they are accurate and I can cut a few pieces at a time with my small rotary cutter; a rotating mat makes it really easy to cut these shapes.


I then mark the registration marks on the back of each piece with a pencil. this makes lining up the pieces much easier before you sew.


I like to lay out all the patches wrong side up on a flannel board to make sure they are all there and the right way up! They never look like they will fit together 😀


Linda Franz has an excellent video demonstrating how to stitch these gentle curves, you can find it on YouTube here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcF4jkDVwQo

I have pieced the first block, but my hand piecing skills are very rusty, I think I need a bit more practice



EDITED: I thought it would be fun to link up with a couple of new blogs this week:
Sew, Stitch, Snap & Share
Let's Bee Social
Needle n Thread Thursday

11 July 2017

The July Gardern

Come for a walk with me around the garden...

The penstemon are at their peak...






as are the hydrangeas... (we have clay soil, it doesn't matter what I add, ours are always hot pink)





It's been a very good year for the perennial sweet peas...


The bees are loving the lavender and the buddleja (as are the butterflies)




I love this Himalayan honeysuckle ...



The crocosmia are looking wonderful...



and the first of the dahlias ...



The agapanthus is just coming out


and the pots of geraniums are so cheerful



I keep deadheading my old roses and they keep on flowering and flowering ....






05 July 2017

Storing Fat Quarters and Scraps

I went to put away some fabrics that I had finished with, and realised that my fabric storage system really wasn't working for me, everything was sorted by colour and just cramed into my wire baskets.

Exhibit A

I spent a long time with my coffee looking at photos of quilter's stashes and reading how other people store their fabrics; the problem for me is that a lot of the systems which looked great were designed for large pieces i.e. yardage or required cutting fabric into useable sized squares or strips.

The problem with this is that 99.9% of my stash consists of pieces smaller than a FQ. I knew I need to do something, but the question was what?


I have 3 baskets of pink/red fabrics ranging in size from a FQ down to 2" square, I knew that I wanted to keep my fabrics in one piece, so all those wonderful ideas where you cut your scraps down into strips or squares and then sort by size really wouldn't work for me. I like to cut fabric for a project as I go along and I don't know what size I will want 😁

The thing that all these great systems had in common was that fabric looked tidy because it was folded into a uniform size. I knew I didn't want to invest in any other storage, so I measured my baskets and worked out that I could fit 3 rows of  6" wide fabric in my 7" deep drawers.  I made myself a template from a piece of mount board and started folding.

I started with a FQ wrong side up with the shorter/selvedge edge running vertically


and placed my template in the bottom right corner


Then you just use the template as a guide to fold over the fabric


Keep folding until you end up with a strip 6" wide, an imperial FQ will fold nicely into 3


I flipped my template out and turned the strip over so all the raw edges were in front of me


Then using the template again I rolled the strip along the long 7" edge


Keep rolling until you run out of fabric, again an imperial FQ will roll nicely into 3


It also works really well for 1/2 yd or yard cuts as well as odd sized pieces, as long as they are at least 6" wide and so that you can see them in the stack at least 14" long.





I decided to pull out all my scraps that are less than 6" x 14" and store them separately in these plastic boxes that I repurposed.

I have a long way to go, but a little at a time I will tame the mess! I think I have a system that will work for me.