Wednesday 23 April 2014

Still playing with the last of those linen scraps...

This is a very quick and dirty laptop cover.  There's a layer of batting for protection but no quilting or fastening, just a basic fabric envelope.



I actually started this a few months ago before a holiday in France, but I managed to sew it so that the bunnies were upside-down, and it annoyed me so much I unpicked it as soon as we got home.  And now at last it is finished.  Perhaps that means I should go on holiday again...

Wednesday 16 April 2014

A Cushion

I was seized with the desire to make a cushion this weekend.  Recently we re-did our sitting room and I got a bit carried away with making everything co-ordinate in shades of yellow and grey, and having finished, I've decided it's a bit matchy, and some more random is called for.

I had a rootle through my home decor weight and linen scraps - most of which have come from scrap rolls - and put the following pile together.



It sewed up pretty quickly - I used big chunks because these fabrics fray so quickly, and just pieced them randomly.  My favourite kind of quilting if I'm honest.  For the back, I used the daisies and the guitars since they were the only bits left that were big enough, and this rather brilliant zip tutorial from Fiona at the Village Haberdashery.

(I'm not showing you the rest of the room just at the moment because it is A MIDDEN.)


Then I decided it was about time we got some cats on this blog.  So I took it upstairs to the bedroom where Deeley (the black one) and Marsha (the tortoiseshell one) are usually sleeping and tried to pose them nicely with it.

Marsha was having none of it.


Deeley, meanwhile, despite being black and usually quite hard to photograph, obligingly sat on the window side of the cushion and looked into the lens and everything.  She's good, is Deeley.  She eats carpets, but for the most part she's pretty good.


Ah, beautiful!  Well done Deeley.

...Marsha.  Go AWAY.


Friday 11 April 2014

Vintage-style Kaleidoscope Quilt Top


And here it is - a finished quilt top.  I'm quite pleased with this one!  The soft muted colours work really well together, especially with the white sashing to make it all pop a bit.

I'm less pleased with the fact my camera seems to have gone a bit peculiar - the bottom part of that photo is in focus but the top isn't?  And the depth of field (technical terminology, get me) isn't huge, so...  I don't know.  I shall have to get Tom to have a look at it this evening.

The quilt top meanwhile will be put away for a bit, since I have far too many other things I need to get on with.  Hopefully I can come back to it before too long and get it basted up and quilted.

Monday 7 April 2014

A Few Blocks




These are paper-pieced string blocks for what will be a vintagey-looking Kaleidoscope quilt.  In a spirit of stashbusting, because I have a lot of sad, neglected stash from back when I started buying quilting fabrics which isn't... quite... to my current tastes.

As ever with stash quilts, I ended up supplementing things with a few small new purchases - but they were vintage!  A bag of real actual vintage scraps for £5!   Several of them shriveled alarmingly under my iron and revealed themselves to be not actually cotton, but all the rest I used.  Gosh, I'm so thrifty!  And not a sucker at all.