A Journey of Some Scraps

I'm not the sort of quilter who keeps every last little scrap, in fact I'm pretty brutal with the sizes of scraps I throw away (otherwise I would be drowning in them even more than I actually am!), but when I finished making this 3D Improv Dresden block the fabrics were so pretty and looked so good together that I couldn't bear to bin them.

The block was made as a class sample for my Stitch Gathering workshop in September and I used mainly fabrics from our goody bag, including beautiful Cloud 9, Michael Miller and Lotta Jansdotta fabrics. The background is from Euclid, the gorgeous range of printed Essex linen designed by Carolyn Friedlander.

I was feeling a little frazzled and over stimulated the day after the Stitch Gathering, so I turned my phone off and went to my sewing room for a little relaxing play time.

First of all I sewed the big scraps together, these were the off-cuts from the strips. I made a nice scrappy panel. Then I sewed the little scraps together, these were off-cuts from the Dresden wedges and I had enough to make two pieces, one big and one small, which I bordered with strips of Euclid.

We were very lucky to have Carina Envoldsen-Harris visit us to teach workshops at both myBearpaw Studio and the Stitch Gathering and I was so inspired by her work. Carina is a fabulous embroiderer with a few excellent books of motifs to her name. She taught a class about embellishing patchwork with her beautiful embroidered flowers. So I decided to have a go.

I've been a bit obsessed by teasels recently, there is big patch of them that I can see from my sewing room window and I love their shape and their 'spikyness'.  So I drew up a design and (because I had left the lead to my light box at the shop) free-hand drew it on to the scrappy panel.

I then spent some lovely relaxing hours embroidering the teasels.

I totally love the way this turned out! 

I had intended all along to turn it into a zippy pouch but put it aside until my next workshop which was a week or so ago. 

I used it as my class sample (loving the fact that the fabric had started off as another class sample!) and made this rather fetching pouch using the other scrappy panel for the back.

I may not have mentioned it yet but I am going to QuiltCon in Savannah next year and this little beauty will be coming with me so I can show it off in the workshops I am taking!

But what about that other scrappy panel I mentioned? The small one? Yes I still had a little more life to squeeze out of those scraps yet!

This one got the matchstick quilting treatment with a variegated pink Aurifil 50, together with a few rows of hand quilting with DMC Perle 8.

And then it became a cute little needlebook!

Which of course goes perfectly with my pouch (those QuiltCon ladies are going to be SO impressed!).

So there you go, a journey of some scraps. Instead of binning them I turned them into two (excuse my bragging) beautiful handmade items and had lots of fun along the way!

So next time you go to bin your little scraps - think again!

Linking up with Scraptastic Tuesdays!

Scraptastic Applique!

A few weeks ago we announced the workshops for our Thread House Retreat in January. The retreat sold out after just 6 days! Karen, Lynne and I are teaching two workshops each (the most popular of which can be repeated) and one of mine is needle-turn applique. So I thought it would be nice to make up a new design for the class. You can check out all the Thread House Retreat workshops here.

I am very into dark backgrounds at the moment and I wanted something with lots of flowers, so I decided that a big bowl of blooms would be nice. I have a lot of flower patterns already tested from the Seasonal Garland Cushion series I have been doing for Today's Quilter and this was a nice opportunity to use them again.

I managed to use up lots of scraps for the leaves and flowers. Here are is a nice 'in progress' shot so you can see how you need to sew down all the petals before you attach the centres.

I'm very pleased with how this turned out (especially as it was exactly how I envisaged it!), but I knew the bowl would need a little something extra (to balance all the detail above). I had inserted a piece of wadding behind the bowl fabric halfway round sewing it down so that I could add some hand quilting (and get a nice texture).

Using one of the motifs from the bowl fabric itself as inspiration (fabric is from Color Brigade by Jennifer Paganelli) I drew a flower pattern freehand and quilted it in red, adding a few French knots to finish.

Now I need to decide what to do with this. A cushion? A bag? Or the start of a new quilt, perhaps the centre of a medallion?

 

And here is a little sneak peek of a new applique block I am working on. 

Have you heard about Project 48 Quilt? It is a year long QAL type project organised by Crystal and Linden. Every month there is a set theme and they each design a modern and a traditional block. Two guest bloggers also design a modern and traditional block, and my month is September and I am doing the modern take on Applique. 

I am linking up with Scraptastic Tuesday today! Check out all the other Scraptastic offerings here.

Scraptastic Midnight Meadow Quilt

Recently I've been teaching an evening class based on my Improv Meadow Quilt below. So of course I've been making another quilt alongside the students, but this time with a dark background.

The first 5 sessions were all about using different improv techniques to create flowers, leaves and stems.

Here are some of my class samples for leaves and stems.

And here's what I imaginatively call my 'wedge flower' with added yo-yo. These are a great way to use up scraps, though I have been into my stash for the dark backgrounds.

Here's a second scrappy wedge flower, this one with an appliqued centre.

And then we had a week making these freehand foundation pieced quarter circles that are based on this tutorial. I got a bit carried away and made 3! 

There's also an improv Dresden quarter, a porthole and a scrappy improv flower in the photo above (as well as a mistake NYB piece from a recent quilt that I later rejected) and I've started to jigsaw piece them together...

This is how far I've got. It's a bit bigger than the first one at 54in wide, rather than 43in, and I still plan to take the background upwards as in the original. Plus I'll be adding in some more EPP flowers and hand appliqued stems and leaves, but I am still rationing my hand work (because of my 'poor paw' which is thankfully much improved) so that will have to wait for a bit.

I've graded the dark backgrounds from greys, through charcoals to black. The idea is that there's moonlight shining down on the left hand side. So the question is should I call this 'Midnight Meadow' or 'Moonlit Meadow', what do you think?

We have two sessions left on the course and my students are also at the 'jigsaw piecing' part, so we are using a lot of the Design Grid Flannel in the studio at the moment. I can't wait to share their amazing work - they have all been so creative!

I am linking up with Scraptastic Tuesday today (even though it's actually Wednesday, apparently that's still allowed!) for the second time this year!

Scraptastic Tuesday - the first time!

For ages now I've been meaning to post about and link up with Scraptastic Tuesday, hosted by the wonderful Nicky and Leanne, but I've never been able to get my act together. If I am using scraps I forget all about it and if I remember it then I have nothing scrappy to show!

But last week I started working on my Blueberry Park Mini Quilt Swap piece. This is an Instagram swap hosted by Nina. I have a lot of scraps of Karen's screen printed fabric left over from the Buffer Wheel quilt I made last year. Karen printed these up specially for this quilt so I think some of them are quite unique and may be appreciated by my Karen Lewis loving partner.

So I started having a good old play around with them and ended up with these improv curve blocks. 

I made these four (above), but when I put them together (on my lovely design wall!) I thought that the bottom left looked a little out of place (with it's thicker circle). So I made another one, below...

But when I put them all together I realised that it was the top left pink and orange block that now looked out of place. So with a little jiggery pokery on the other block, I swapped them back around and I think I made it work (check top photo to see if you agree with my final decision!). 

I then sashed in that lovely charcoal crosshatch from Carolyn Friedlander. There was a lot of very helpful feedback and advice via the IG crowd while I was working on these and sharing my progress .

And then on Friday I found myself using scraps again! I was prepping for my Buffer Wheel workshop which was on Sunday and the first one of these I had taught. In my head it was very straight forward and I had the pattern notes written and everything. Still I thought I better just try it out as a refresher.

So I 'decided' to change around the background and colour wedges to make it look a bit different (yes that's right, I did decide this and in no way did I totally forget the pattern and mistakenly make it this way!). Anyway it's a good job I tried it out so I could show the class how to do it the right way as you can see below. Lot's of Blueberry Park on show here and some very clever students.

Meanwhile I quite like this rising sun half block and think I will leave it like this (otherwise I will have to make ANOTHER cushion!!).

Check out all the other Scraptastic Tuesday action here!