Quilt Blocks – NEW EVERY MORNING

Saturday Quilting Bring and Share (60)

May 18, 2019May 18, 2019 by Allison Reid

Welcome to Saturday Quilting Bring & Share 🙂 Hope you have plenty of good things to look forward to over this weekend. Do join in this virtual sewing day: bring along your projects(s), take a seat, have a drink of your choice close to hand and share in some of the conversations running round the Worldwide Quilting Community. You are very welcome to share links and join in the conversations by using the comments box at the end of this post.

Sewing has been the ‘side’ rather than the ‘main course’ for me this week as the weather has been favourable for working at the allotment. All is now fairly well prepared for planting out the bean and sweetcorn plants I have been nurturing in the little greenhouse stood against the sun-trap back wall of my house. I also kept myself busy by putting my powers of procrastination to good use, doing some jobs around the house that have been bugging me for some time. Funny how not wanting to do one thing can be the motivation to actually doing another! The sink and floor in my kitchen are now sparkling (but I haven’t finished writing a pattern which is what I should have been doing…).

Here is the progress I’ve made with the new blocks and pattern I’m developing. Over the course of a few short sessions at the sewing machine I completed all the units required to make up the remaining twelve blocks. Today I will continue putting the blocks together and plan to have the centre of the quilt top stitched together before Sunday evening.

Earlier this morning I went through my usual routine of filling the bird feeders in the garden. We had much needed rain last night and my attention was caught by the raindrops clinging to our first rose bloom of the year and to all the leaves in the garden.

WARNING: Digression ahead!! This may mystify anyone under the age of 50 who wasn’t brought up in the UK!

After that visit to the garden I got the phrase ‘rain drops on roses’ in my head which led to recollecting the song ‘These are a few of my favourite things’ from the Sound of Music. Now, I have NEVER seen The Sound of Music and this is a fact I wear as a badge of honour (apologies to those of you who may be sinking into a state of deep shock, I know the film and stage productions of this musical are sacred to many). BUT some of the songs are buried deep in my consciousness. How? Well! I think it must be due to the many Saturday mornings of my childhood spent listening to the radio show, ‘Junior Choice’: A request show hosted by Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart. He played a great mix of contemporary pop tunes, songs from musicals, signature tunes like ‘Champion the Wonder Horse’ and ‘Casey Jones’ alongside funny story songs – ‘Right Said Fred’, ‘The Runaway Train’ and one of my Mum’s favourites, a cautionary tale by Shel Silverstein, about Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout who would not take the garbage out (‘garbage’ was a lovely new word to get my tongue around as in the UK we use the word ‘rubbish’ rather than ‘garbage’). If you are of a nervous disposition you might want to take cover before listening to the following recording…. This is definitely NOT Julie Andrews 😀

END of Digression. On to some links into the Worldwide Quilting Community:

Remember the Carolina Hurricane Quilts appeal? Carole has an update on this amazing cause that has brought comfort to the victims of the hurricane through the generosity of patchwork quilters. Carole’s post contains a lovely gallery of many of the quilts that have been through her home recently and shows them being delivered to a collection point too. 🙂

Amy Ellis has her new website ‘Sew Modern Quilts‘ up and running. She plans it to be a resource for new patchwork quilters in particular. With details of how she chose the fabrics, colours and quilting designs for many of her quilts it certainly should be worth paying regular visits to the site.

Cheryl has given a lovely modern twist to a patchwork favourite – stars. Her quilt design is really engaging particularly with the summery colours she has chosen to use.

Happy Stitching!

Allison

Saturday Quilting Bring and Share (59)

May 13, 2019May 11, 2019 by Allison Reid

Welcome to Saturday Quilting Bring & Share. Do take some time to join in this virtual sewing day, bring along your projects and share in the conversations using the links below. Please do contribute to the conversations and add links to your projects by making use of the Comments box at the bottom of this page. Thank you!

Just two weeks ago I wrote about my mission to finish a quilt and how being so focused I had actually stopped thinking about other projects… Well! I now find myself in a complete whirl with project ideas and designs whizzing around in my mind – sometimes they land long enough to have a play on EQ7 and one design has even come to life with a lone test block completed.

With all this design activity I’m having to grapple with several of my personal bug-bears. One is making Snowball corners. This design demands several and as always I’m struggling with (i) keeping my blocks square (ii) letting go of all the little triangles of fabric I’ve snipped off the corners!

Another bug-bear issue is technology – uggh! I’m ashamed to admit I do have a strong ‘can’t do’ attitude towards new-to-me technology. This week I have procrastinated over a pdf reader/writer thingy that I need to use in order to produce a downloadable pattern with foundation paper piecing templates. I just can’t see me getting to grips with this. The pattern may be available in printed form only…

On a much more positive note: I’m taking great delight in seeing flowers opening on Hawthorn bushes in our garden. The bushes are growing vigorously after being transplanted as self-seeded saplings from our allotment several years ago. I thought they would fill a corner in our garden, acting as a hedge between our neighbours’ gardens. This is the first season the Hawthorns have flowered and they do look beautiful.

And this week I have a bumper crop of inspiration and information to share with you from the Worldwide Quilting Community:

Nancy has been testing out the effectiveness of different permanent markers on fabric. I was especially interested to follow her experiment as I use a Pigma Micron marker to write details on the labels of my quilts.

Michelle is reflecting on ‘community’, with particular reference to patchwork quilting, and asking questions of herself and readers about the nature of community. Click here to read the first in a series of posts on the subject, Michelle would like us to share our views and experiences of community. This is a subject that always catches my attention, after all the whole point of Saturday Quilt & Share is to foster interaction between quilters around the world.

Christa Watson has published a new pattern called ‘Color Weave’. She has made it in the rainbow colours of her own fabric line combined with two shades of grey. I find it very intriguing.

Do you have a bit of a soft spot for hens? If so I think you will be clucking over the ‘Chickens’ quilt pattern by Allison Harris. The Chicken quilt she uses in the photos is even quilted with a chicken wire pattern!

Did you know ‘temperature quilts’ are a thing? New to me but not so new it would seem. Create a quilt by using coloured fabric to record the day-by-day changes of temperature in your location. Click over to the Elm Street Quilts site to find out more and see some example quilts.

I can’t help being drawn to scrap quilts! Kristie shares the method she is employing to use up her scrap fabric strips.

As I explained above I’m not a fan of snowball corners but I will persevere… The centre unit of the block I’ve made is a square-in-a-square rather than a snowball. Imagine my delight when I found Quilter’s Paradise have an on-line calculator that figures out the fabric cutting sizes for square-in-a-square blocks! Excellent! The calculator worked just right and saved me quite a bit of time. 🙂

Lorna at Sew Fresh Quilts has created a great range of pieced quilts featuring animals, characters and objects. She’s working on a pattern depicting a Triceratops dinosaur at the moment.

Amy Ellis has the ‘One Thing Challenge’ running over on Instagram. The Challenge aims to encourage us to name the one thing we are going to get done to move a project forward and there’s the opportunity for a bit of accountability with a weekly check-in. And there are prizes! This is the link to her blog post about the Challenge and here are the IG hashtags: ‘To name your ONE THING comment on the current IG photo or post an image with #onethingwithamy To share your finish, post with #onethingwithamyfinish⠀’.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Ever wanted to make a Lone Star quilt but been put off by the thought of all those ‘Y’ seams? Julie Herman of Jaybird Quilts has resolved the ‘Y’ seam issue using her Super Sidekick Ruler. Her Lone Star pattern is available now and her sample quilt is a bit special – there are some Tula Pink fabrics and quilting by Angela Walters – do click on the link to take a look (there’s a sweet baby too!).

Lots of inspiration this week… I’ll close with a link to Yvonne’s thought-provoking post titled ‘Finding Design Inspiration‘. She belongs to a couple of design groups that encourage members to stretch their imaginations and skills by creating a quilt/block/mini-quilt inspired by a shared image.

Happy Stitching!

Linking up with Design Wall Monday for even more inspiration!

Allison

Saturday Quilting Bring and Share (57)

April 27, 2019 by Allison Reid

Welcome to another edition of Saturday Quilting Bring & Share 🙂 It’s a virtual sewing day with a chance to bring along your latest project(s) and share in the conversations across the Worldwide Quilting Community. You’ll find links to some blog posts below and you are welcome to add to the conversations by writing and sharing links in the comments box at the end of this post. Thank you!

After all the rushing around last week to finish the Scrappy Trip Along quilt, these last few days I’ve only spent a few hours sewing. I did enjoy another of the monthly sewing days at Brown Candover. I was still in a bit of a dither over which project to work on next…. In the end I decided to start a new project *blush*. At a quilt show two or three years ago I bought the fabrics pictured below – a jelly roll and charm pack of Moda’s Mirabella range along with 2m of background.

Saturday Quilting Bring and Share (54)

April 5, 2019April 6, 2019 by Allison Reid

Welcome to Saturday Quilting Bring & Share. I hope you have time to bring along a project or two to this virtual sewing day and share in some of the conversations that are circulating round the Worldwide Quilting Community. Do add links and your thoughts in the Comments box at the end of this post. Thank you!

Well! My big news this week is the publication of my I-Spy Shadow Quilt pattern. I have had to be very disciplined, chaining myself to the computer and overcoming a series of irritating problems BUT it’s all smiles and happy dances now! The pattern is available as a pdf download from my Etsy Shop – www.etsy.com/shop/AllisonPatchworks/ . There are two versions of the pattern, one to print out on A4 sheets of paper the other to print onto US Letter paper.

I did break loose of the chains and get to my sewing table on a few occasions through the week 😉 My plan was to make a 12″ patchwork block using three fabrics: dark, medium and light. Then make four 6″ blocks of the same pattern, using the same fabrics, to show how secondary patterns develop when quilt blocks are put together. I made Contrary Wife blocks.

Contrary Wife Blocks by Allison Reid — Contrary Wife Blocks. One 12″ and then four 6″ blocks.

These blocks didn’t make my heart sing… I realised too late there wasn’t enough contrast between the light and medium fabrics and maybe that was making the dark fabric contrast too starkly in these isolated blocks? Taking a photograph and editing it to Black & White confirmed the lack of contrast between the medium and light fabrics I’d used. Disappointing but I’m ‘living and learning’!

I went back to my stash and picked another three fabrics. The B&W test on these shows more balanced contrast I think. Time to start again…

‘Contrast’: The language of colour is a bit of a mystery to me. Back in my school days I was more than happy to drop Physics and spend a few hours a week quietly ‘doing’ art (to a not very high standard). Now as I grope around trying to understand colour I realise I was actually taught more about colour in science lessons than in Art lessons – but I can remember little of it apart from the astonishing fact that white and black are not colours – huh? Forty years on and I am trying to understand more of and use correctly the language of colour.

Here is a brief summary of my language of colour learning so far:

Hue – where is a colour on the colour wheel i.e is it red or blue or yellow or something in between? Basically what colour am I looking at?
Value – light through to dark shades of a colour. So I misjudged the value of the colours I originally chose for my Contrary Wife blocks?
Saturation – the intensity of colour. I guess we’ve all read about the ‘saturated colours’ used by particular fabric designers? I’m thinking Kaffe Fassett and Tula Pink…
Clarity – is the colour clear or ‘muddy’? Could that be the difference between say lime green and sage green?
Tone – hum! I haven’t quite got it straight how to identify and talk/write about tone. Every hue has ‘tones’ and identifying these helps us match up different colours – some look ‘comfortable’ together, others just look ‘off’.

As you can tell my colour learning is in it’s infancy! Could you recommend any helpful books or websites with a light tone that could add value and clarity without saturating me in the deep science of hues? 😀

Here are just a few of the blog posts that have caught my interest through the week:

Kirsty has posted a great pictorial tutorial showing us how to make a rectangular Diamond Quilt Block – it’s a stash buster!

Bernie has been true to her word and published a blog post on 1st April giving us all the opportunity to share and read about each others less than perfect quilt making moments! Contributors have been refreshingly honest and the stories might make your heart sink in sympathy but also skip a beat realising that what goes on in our sewing rooms isn’t always the perfection we see paraded on social media!

I had a bit of a light-bulb moment when I read through Katy’s Sewing Diamonds Tutorial. Very useful indeed! 🙂 And her matching seams are to die for!

Fancy sewing an emoji cushion or quilt? Teri reviews the new ‘Sew Emoji’ pattern book by Gailen Runge.

Becca has made a beautiful quilt called ‘Saltwater Taffy’. The quilt is based on an antique design which has strong links to her location in New Jersey. Becca’s post is a really interesting read.

Christa Watson is an accomplished patchwork quilter – writer of patterns, books and designer of fabrics. She is sharing a real-time series of her ventures into dress-making, a whole other sewing world! Read Part 1 here and find out how she plans to adjust patterns.

Do let me know if you can point me to books and websites that could give further enlightenment on the language of colour. Thank you!

Happy Stitching.

Allison