Sewing summary for 2022

I ended my summary for last year with “I expect 2022 will be more of the same” and in terms of sewing this has proved to be fairly accurate.

There has been a familiar mix of full and mini sized quilts, items for online challenges and something for me to wear; however, this year has also seen a welcome return to sewing for charity and my sewing for 2022 includes:

• 2 full sized quilts – 1 for Project Linus and 1 for a friend’s birthday
• A quilted teapot and tea cups for a Queen’s Jubilee online challenge
• A mini quilt based on a floor tile, also made for an online challenge
• A top for me (to go with a skirt made three years ago)
• 18 reusable Christmas drawstring bags for a charity Christmas Fayre
• 18 tree decorations, also for the charity Christmas Fayre
• A last-minute Christmas drawstring bag for a gift to my neighbours

In non-sewing ways, 2022 has seen a gradual return of pre-COVID normality. When I went to Festival of Quilts, there were still the wide aisles and extra space from 2021, but I also noticed the return of visitors from abroad. Another welcome return has been resumption of in-person meetings for Leeds Quilt Group and the chance to see familiar faces and meet new ones.

Here’s to 2023 and I hope it will be filled with more quilts, more odd items for challenges, more charity items and perhaps a few garments for me.

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Crafting for Christmas

This month I have been sewing some tree decorations for the hospice Christmas Fayre. These were a variation on EPP and were made by tacking fabric to hexagon papers, folding each in half and then sewing three hexagons together.

I included ribbon for hanging and added some beads and bells to given them some weight to help them hang.

I also made a few more gift bags, this time with a boxed base and a cardboard insert to give more structure.

As everything I made was sold at the Fayre, I think I will be on the look out for festive fabrics in the sales to make more next year.

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Is it too early to mention Christmas?

Until a few days ago, I had no sewing to show for October, but I finally manage to spend some time at the sewing machine at the weekend and now have these re-usable gift bags made.

These are for a hospice Christmas Fayre and I hope they will appeal to people’s desire to be more sustainable with their Christmas wrapping.

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My first Burda pattern (I think)

I’ll start this by saying that the pattern was a lot easier to sew than to photograph and apologise for the photos - gathers and a cowl neck are difficult to show.

I’ve not sewn a Burda pattern before and I knew that the newer patterns now included seam allowances, but I wasn’t expecting to find the pattern layout diagrams on the tissue paper rather than on the instruction sheet.

Once cut out, the pattern went together fairly easily and quickly, though I might try a different way of finishing the back neck edge if I make this again. I may have stretched the binding while sewing but it seems bulky and doesn’t want to lay flat.

I like the ruching at the sides, but again if I were to make another, I would try a stretchier elastic or different way of gathering as the ruching is not as tight as I would like.

Although not perfect, this top is wearable and will be useful to go with plain trousers or skirts or with the matching skirt I made three years ago!

 

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Festival of Quilts 2022

It’s time for my annual report about Festival of Quilts. This year I spent two days there (Thursday and Friday) as there were two lectures I wanted to hear on the Friday afternoon and I thought just half a day would not be sufficient to see the quilts and do some shopping.

Train strikes were planned on the Thursday and Saturday which affected many people’s plans. I had to travel to Birmingham a day early, but had no problems getting trains to/from Birmingham New Street and Birmingham International on the Thursday. It was difficult to judge the crowds, but Friday was busier than Thursday, probably due to the train strike. As with last year, the show was spread over 4 halls which makes comparison with pre-Covid years tricky but I got the impression it was still not back to pre-COVID numbers, however, it was nice to hear some international voices again.

This year the workshops, galleries and VIP lounge were in Hall 6, the traders were in Halls 7 and 8, and the quilts were displayed in part of Hall 9. There were more traders than last year and the space between the stalls was maintained at last year’s level. Some of the bigger names returned this year, but there were still a few notable absences which is perhaps why there was plenty of seating scattered around the halls.

I was quite focussed with my shopping* and even though I was unlucky in my quest to get some background fabric for the Cats in Space quilt, I did get some metallic fabrics for the space suits and helmets and some suitable fabric for ginger cats. I picked up some useful things at the Project Linus stand including a couple of fabric marking pens, some vintage Sylko reels for display and an odd shaped remnant of a low volume fabric which is the equivalent to 3 FQs and I think it is Moda Grunge. I also picked up a few bits as prizes in the Quilts for Care Leavers raffle – a magnetic telescopic pick up stick, a FQ and a bobbin keeper. My best bargains were two packs of Warm & Natural twin sized quilt wadding which were £5 each on the P&Q magazine stand which I think must have been subscription gifts at some point. Even allowing for the 59p large carrier bag I had to get to carry them home in, it is still a saving of ~£20 per pack! I also picked up a few pieces of red and cream fabrics with a hint of Christmas from there and it was quite sad to see all the clearance items and back issues on the stand and everyone was saying that the magazine will be missed. I didn’t buy any Liberty fabric this year, but I did get some free quilt patterns from the Liberty stand which may help me use my stash.

 

The display of the quilts was a bit more irregular than previously with the wooden display frames arranged in short zig-zag formations at various angles which, for me, made it more difficult to view them in a methodical manner. All of the quilts can be viewed on the FoQ website and you have until Friday 9^th September to vote for the Visitors’ Choice. As the quilts can be viewed online, rather than include lots of photos of quilts in this post, I will show a few of the competition quilts caught my eye and gave me ideas that I might like to try.

MD41, Sampling Modernity, Linda Chevell

 

TD33, Japanese Log Cabin, Chris Harvey

 

MD22, Airspace, Kathleen Anderson

 

The two lectures were both excellent - one was about the Liberty archive by Anna Buruma, Head Archivist at Liberty and the other was about the shoddy trade and was by Jo Andrews of Haptic and Hue. Another excellent attraction was the gallery of quilts by Sarah Hibbert (@quiltscornerstone on Instagram). I liked her use of neutral linen fabrics and as I have quite a lot of "linen type" fabric I got from Abakhan's ages ago I might be tempted to use more of it.

 

Unlike many previous years, I came away from this year’s trip with some inspiration and some ideas to try. I’m still not tempted to make a show quilt and a story to go with it, and instead will stick to making quilts for family, friends and charity.

* All purchases had to pass feline inspection while I was trying to take a photo.

 

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A magical birthday quilt

About four weeks before the event, I realised a friend’s significant birthday was approaching and I needed to make something special for it. Fortunately, this coincided with her telling me of a recent Harry Potter themed weekend away and me buying some Harry Potter FQs in a supermarket with a view to making a quilt for Project Linus. The FQs were repurposed, some more Harry Potter fabrics bought, a few days taken off work and I managed to get a quilt made in time for the big day.

The feature fabrics are framed in churn dashes and I left plenty of negative space for two types of quilting. The main quilting is straight-line quilting inside the churn dashes and free motion “stars and squiggles” meandering around the churn dashes. For the largest churn dashes, a few stars were added to keep the layers together.

In the negative spaces I quilted Harry Potter associated words by printing the words onto thin paper and stitching through the paper around each letter. To make the word stand out a little, I used Aurifil 28wt thread whereas the “stars and squiggles” used Aurifil 40wt thread.

I even put a label of sorts on the back of the quilt, though the quilt police would probably tell me off for not including my name.

Now this has been handed over to a very happy Harry Potter fan, I can go back to my original plan of making a Project Linus quilt as there is plenty of fabric remaining.

* This was not an entirely solo effort - I did receive the usual feline assistance.

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From floor tile to mini quilt

This month’s sewing has been for an online challenge to make a patchwork block inspired by pictures of tiles.

The house in which I grew up had a tiled hall and I managed to find an old photo of it. I knew the tiles were likely made by Maw & Co of Jackfield and via Google I was able to find an old pattern book of their "Geometric and Roman Mosaics Encaustic Tile Pavements". Looking at the pattern book, it would suggest our hall was pattern number 29 but with a slight variation on the border to make it narrower.

 

Even though there are various options for a quilt block in the main part of the floor, I decided to make the corner embellishment shown in the pattern book using FPP templates.

 

Each FPP square finished at 2” and were not too complicated to make. However, there was quite a bit of cursing and unpicking after I had sewn the squares together and realised that blocks with long black triangles were facing the wrong way.

 

Once everything was facing the correct way, I added a 1” border and quilted it using stitching nearly in the ditch. With a half inch binding, the finished size is ~9”.

 

(While looking at the photo of the hall floor for this project, I spotted a mistake in the border tiles that must have been there since the floor was laid, but went unnoticed all the time I was living there.)

 

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Tea for the Jubilee

I recently took part in an online Jubilee sewing challenge which had the theme of “British” and “Royalty”. After a bit of thinking, I decided to make a tea set given that a cup of tea is often associated with “Britishness”.

I found a free teapot pattern on Youtube, but I had just three pieces of fabric with a London or red/white/blue royal theme and each were only ~24cm square.

To make the fabric go further, I used contrasting fabric for part of the teapot and saucers but even with the contrasting fabrics, I still had to resize the pattern resulting in lots of teapot and teacup toiles.

To make the teapot and teacups stand up, I used two layers of cotton and one layer of quilting batting. Some additional interfacing was used in the teapot lid and piping cord was added to the handles. The binding and decorations on the teapot were chosen to reflect a red, white and blue theme.

These were quite fun to make, but fiddly in parts and now I have no idea what to do with them.

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Quilting Part 2

The criss-cross quilt is finished, washed and ready to go to Project Linus.

As expected, my plans to use some free motion quilting in the criss-cross sections changed and I used a serpentine stitch instead, using different colours of thread to match with the different fabrics. I didn’t want the rows of stitching to run parallel to each other, so I changed the stitch length on every other row which helped make them out of sync.
 

I’m really pleased with the texture of the quilting and the contrasting styles, which shows up particularly well on the back of the quilt.

 

Now I need to decide on what to start next.

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Quilting Part 1

I was a bit optimistic when I thought I might manage to finish the quilting and binding this month. However, progress has been made and the grey sections have been quilted with straight line stitching.

 

My stash of Aurifil 40wt was lacking in the right colours for the criss-cross sections but fortunately they do a “Colour Builder” collection which has three very useful colours for this quilt.

I think I might try some free motion quilting in the criss-cross sections, but like most of my plans, this may be subject to change.

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Quilt Progress

A flurry of activity during one weekend saw good progress being made on the Criss-Cross quilt. There was some sewing followed by lots of pinning resulting in a sandwiched quilt.

 

Hopefully next month will be a time for quilting and binding.

 

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New year, new quilt plans

January started with some rummaging around in my stash to try to find eight fabrics, a backing and a binding to make a criss-cross woven effect quilt.

After supplementing what I found in my stash with a couple of on-line purchases, I thought I was ready to go, but when I laid out the fabrics on the bed, one of them didn’t look quite right.

Luckily, I had the chance to visit a bricks and mortar fabric shop at the weekend and found an alternative that is a much better option.

The geometric print (top row middle) will be replaced by the new dotty print (bottom row right). However, when the quilt is made and handed to Project Linus, the recipient is in for a surprise as the new fabric glows in the dark!

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