Handkerchief Corners Quilt

I realised that I've been keeping this blog for just over a year, so happy blogging birthday to me! I started last year with the quilt I made for Dominic and Carolyn's wedding. It was the first, and so far, only, full-sized quilt I've made (despite many good intentions!). I had, however, made a lap quilt beforehand. Thinking back, it came to me that I'd never photographed it so here we have, well over a year late, my Handkerchief Corners quilt.
It was initially going to be full-size but I thought I'd better learn how to bind and quilt somehow before embarking on the quilt for Dominic and Carolyn so I stopped at lap size in order to get it finished. It now measures 106cm square.
I took these pictures in the garden on a very bright day, just before I went to New York. In actuality the colours are a little richer than they appear here - a combination of the sun and my bog-standard camera conspired to bleach them. I love the backing fabric. I'm not sure what it's called - I bought it with lots of other retro 30s fabrics in Branson, Missouri two years ago.
As you can see, Emily appreciates the burrowing potential of a folded quilt! She deserves a special mention today for having been a brave kitty and making it through her neutering operation with minimum fuss. She is back home, and, having got past the wobbly stage, is now in fully-fledged-chemical-madness-stage which involves knocking over all food and water bowls and then marching repeatedly over your humans, purring all the time but never settling down. It doesn't help that she isn't allowed to go out for a while - the vet said to keep her in for EIGHT days. I don't think the carpets (or the cat, or the humans) will be able to stand that! At least the madness is packaged in such cuteness:Going back to the topic of weddings - I heard today that my wonderful bridesmaid Abby is getting married (about time too!). I'm so thrilled for her and Misha. I wonder if this means more commemorative quilting is called for...

Aloha from Hawaii

Ok, so we've actually been back from Hawaii for over a week, it's just taken me a ridiculously long time to do any posting. The island of Oahu was incredibly beautiful - just like all those pictures and movies would have you believe. We were very fortunate to be staying near what had to be the loveliest beach on the island, Kailua Beach, pictured top. From Kailua the bus took us into Honolulu in about 45 minutes. These shots are just a few from around Honolulu and Waikiki.

The flora and fauna were incredible - as just one little example, the plumeria flowers look and smell wonderful, and locals really do wear them in their hair!

A shop in Chinatown selling fresh leis.

On the craft front, there were a few examples of Hawaiian quilts in the art museum we visited.

The top fabric is cut like a paper snowflake then appliqued onto the base fabric. Typically the quilts are in bold, two-tone colours, with shapes often representing natural forms. The quilting is done in tiny, closely packed rows which echo the cut-out design. One description I came across pointed out that Hawaiian clothing did not generate scraps in the same way that 19th century American clothing design did, hence the Hawaiians did not develop comparable patchwork techniques. The echo quilting technique is incredibly time-consuming, with some designs taking up to a year to do. A possible explanation for this is that the quilts are only ever decorative - the crafts people did not have the pressing deadline of a snowy New England winter to work towards and thus could afford to take as much time as they liked!

One of my top recommendations would be Shangri-La, a breathtaking house built in the 1930s near Diamond Head by Doris Duke, an American heiress, as a home for her collection of Islamic art. This picture above just shows the pool house!

Looking at that view everyday wouldn't be difficult! If only I had a magnate's fortune!

Cat-isfaction

Our little friends Agnes and Pip came to stay with us for a whole seven days last week as my parents were away on holiday. We took them back home last night and I'm missing them already. It was wonderful to have them for so long as they really settled in - after a couple of days there wasn't even any hiding under the bed. There were some early problems with our feet (and other body parts) being attacked in the middle of the night but we worked out a good system which saw the cats spend the nights in the kitchen with access to their food, litter and no human toes.

I was excited to see that my lap quilt was a big hit with Pip - praise indeed for the handcrafts, I feel. Here he is snoozing with paws over his eyes on the living room floor...

...and here a little more alert on a dining chair.

I made them a little ball of cotton to play with which was so popular I made them another to take back to Mum and Dads'.

This was a super easy (and effective) toy - I hand-wound some cotton yarn and then with the final 20cm or so threaded on a yarn needle I fed the end up and down through the ball to secure as much of the yarn as I could. This way the cats can abuse it as much as they like but it's very hard to unravel! Actually the pink yarn was from Noel, and since she's a cat lover, I hope she won't mind the use I put it to!

I will leave you with this incredibly cute picture of Pip.

As the British sometimes say, 'pip, pip for now'.

Quilting Green Paper

My first Japanese craft books arrived in the post last week from YesAsia. I got Machine Made Patchworks and then, because it seemed such a waste not to make the free shipping threshold, I added From Quilters Studio too. I had seen Machine Made Patchworks around but was finally motivated to buy it by this post from Manda at Tree Fall Design where she discusses the lovely red quilt she made for her daughter. I've been thinking about doing a quilt for our bedroom and have had some fabric in mind for it. I have a bit of a thing for log cabin designs and I think Manda's quilt with the single colour palette and solid centres is beautiful and really effective. This is the log cabin quilt which features in the book:

I'm planning to do a two-tone colour scheme in yellow and green for ours. I have seven patterns in each tone, mostly half yards and fat quarters.


I cut a few test strips so I could lay out some ideas I had for blocks. For the first one I mixed the colours, using a block of one colour for the middle rounds and the other for the outside.


This second one is a little truer to the book (and Manda's design): sticking to using one colour in the centre and one colour on the outside, I mixed up the fabrics within each colour area.


Although I really like the effect of the second design, I think I will stick to the first one: I like the idea of foregrounding the colour work and letting each fabric speak for itself. Also, Miles prefers symmetry and order so I know the first one is more to his liking. Since he has to share the bed with me, I feel it's only fair his taste is considered too!

For the overall design I'm planning to alternate blocks with green and yellow centres and then maybe join the whole thing together with plain purple borders. Could be a while before it's finished, of course, but the planning is almost as much fun as the making!

D & C Wedding Quilt

I made this quilt for Miles’ brother, Dominic’s, wedding last weekend. I had wanted to make a quilt which incorporated scraps as they are something I have rather a lot of and I think they can work well in a gift as the recipients can mull over it, choosing the fabrics they like best rather than being offered big swathes of what you hope they’ll like! I originally wanted to do a traditional double wedding rings pattern which uses small scraps against a light background. However time constraints and my own inexperience (paper piecing and curves, oh dear) meant that I came up with this modified design. I found a beige background fabric with a pattern of small navy blue fronds (that’s the best I can describe them!) called “Deja’ Blues”. (I love the romanticised names of the American Victorian repro fabrics: they often seem to be along the lines of ‘Confederate Star’ or ‘Belle of the South’. Funny how designers don’t go in for names such as ‘Toiler in the Cotton Fields’ or ‘Exploited Northern Mill Worker’, though…).

Anyway, back to the point at hand, I cut out scrap strips of various lengths then stitched them into long ribbons (lots of seam pressing) and pieced everything together using a sort of contracted log cabin which I think gives a woven effect from a distance. Obviously, although I have plenty of my own scraps, I decided that I needed more and bought a scrap bag from Alicia. I was looking for small scale, generally floral prints and her bag came up trumps. It’s nice to think that her off-cuts found a new home!

I included only one piece of plain fabric on the top, a raspberry taffeta, which I used to embroider ‘D♥C 28.07.07’ for Dominic and Carolyn and their wedding date. I’ve not tried to do letters and numbers in embroidery before (hence the heart not an ampersand – simpler lines!) and I think they came out ok, apart from being a tiny bit wonky!

I’m really pleased with how well the navy polka dot border picks up the blue of the fronds (loving that word). On the back I used the Heather Ross West Hill Matryoshka dolls print in brown, and, as I didn’t have enough for the full width, I put in a couple of edging strips in dark brown. Dominic has a wonderful sense of humour and, as the dolls make me smile, I thought they honoured that in a rather roundabout way (having consulted Miles on this point, he agreed). Although I would have liked to have done the quilting by hand the fact that I only had two days to do it and the binding meant that I machine quilted around each of the eighty squares (overall the quilt came in at about 170cm x 130cm). Bizarrely the quilting was really tiring: having to push and pull the whole fat sandwich through the gap under the machine arm took much more effort than just leisurely quilting on your lap!

Thanks as ever to Miles for being my glamorous assistant, glimpsed here holding up the quilt. I didn’t manage to get a picture of Dominic and Carolyn with their quilt but as they both looked so lovely on the day I feel they deserve a photographic mention!