Scandinavian Christmas

At last I have finished my Christmas wall hanging, just in time for Christmas.

This lovely design is by Lynette Anderson.

All embroidery, applique and quilting is hand stitched.

red quilt finished

At the previous T for T last May I bought very cheaply this red vintage fabric, which had some marks and damage. When I saw it I knew that it would make a good start for quilt.

I managed to salvage enough fabric.

Although strictly speaking it is red and blue, I call this quilt "red" for short.

I matched some fabrics from my stash and bought some new, to compliment the red.

I kept the design of the quilt simple as not to detract from the beauty of the old fabric.

This is the result:

The main fabric is unusual shade of red, difficult to match with quilting thread, so I decided to use a pretty shade of pink for hand quilting, which I think worked very well.

Fabric: vintage, from stash and new

Hand quilting thread: Aurifil 28, shade 2440

spring quilt - finished

A year ago we spent 2 weeks in a pretty town of Rattvik on the shore of lake Siljan, in Dalarna region of Sweden. (You can read more about our time in Sweden in "Sweden 2010" under "labels" on the left.)
I love shopping in Sweden, mainly for fabrics and items for home.
My favourite shop in Rattvik was this shop, on the main street:
full of things you never know you needed, until you visit.

I visited the shop several times during our stay and among my purchases was a selection of matching fabrics, which I thought would make a nice quilt.

I think this is the reason I love making quilts, seeing the transformation from a few pieces of fabrics

 to something hopefully beautiful and very useful at the same time

 

The green fabrics to compliment and for the backing, and also the pink for the binding I bought later in Midsomer Quilting .

It took me a while to decide on a design, I wanted to show the flower pattern at its best.

Eventually I found a design in the Magic Patch magazine.

All the quilting was done by hand, which wasn't always easy, due to a more open weave of some of the fabric.

I decided to call this quilt the "Spring Quilt", because the colours of the fabrics remind me of spring.

It will now live on our sofa to keep me warm during chilly summer evenings. It will always remind me of our holiday in Rattvik.

Threads used:

hand quilting : Aurifil 40, shade 2902 light sage
embroidery: Presencia Finca No8, shade 142

                                                    

HAPPY EASTER !

I finished my spring table runner just in time!

More colours of spring:

 

                                                      Spring table runner.

Fabric: from my stash
Stitcheries: embroidered using Aurifil Mako12, shade 4140
Hand quilting: using Aurifil Mako 28, shade 1135

my first quilt ever, finished at last

 It was about 9 years ago when I got seriously interested in patchwork & quilting, but I didn't know how to start. By a coincidence a new, one year, evening patchwork & quilting course was just about to start at a local school. So, for next 10 months, one evening a week I was learning all about the quilt, from planning, measuring, choice of fabrics, construction....We could choose how large our quilt was going to be. Most ladies went for a baby size or a lap quilt, possibly a single size one. I went for a full size double! (You can tell I was new to this, no idea!!) We all were learning the same blocks, adjusted to the size of our quilt.
We started stitching by hand, but later could also use a sewing machine.
For a reason I can no longer remember, I decided that my first quilt was going to be all hand stitched!
Needless to say, that when the course was finished, my quilt wasn't. It was all hand pieced and all blocks were hand quilted. The course finished, something new and more exiting came along (don't ask what) and my quilt was forgotten, or rather, it has been pushed from corner to corner since. Just under 2 x 2m, my largest UFO. Until last week.
Now, I don't do new year resolutions, by now I know I can't keep them. I don't make stitching plans, I pick up and put down various stitching as the mood takes me and that works for me. But I realised that if I don't finish this quilt now, I never will. Time to introduce it to the machine. So I quilted in the ditch around the blocks, hand quilted around the hearts on the borders and stitched on the binding. May be at some point in the future I could do more quilting on the borders, but that will do for now.

Yes, I can see quite a few faults and the colours and the fabrics would not be my choice today. But despite that, this is not a bad addition to our guest room.

tail feathers quilt

Yesterday was a perfect afternoon for it. Outside was wet and windy, but inside the fire was glowing.
So I settled down in front of TV, put on DVD (Jane Austen's Persuasion) and finished stitching the binding on the Tail Feathers quilt, at last! How better to spend an afternoon like that?
I fell in love with the quilt first time I saw a picture of it about a year ago and I knew I had to make it.
And here it is!

The quilt was originally BOM, but by the time I discovered it I had to get the whole package. This was nearly a year ago, but I did not start on it until early summer, when I took the first stitchery with me on my holiday. I enjoyed the embroidery parts of the quilt most of all. The rest of the quilt is done on the machine.

I am mainly a hand stitcher, but as this is the largest quilt I have made to date, 1.5m x 1.5 m,  I decided to machine quilt the whole thing for the fear that if I don't, it will end up another UFO. This is the first time I machine quilted anything, and I don't do machine embroidery, so please don't look too close.

Design by Natalie Lymer of Cinderberry Stitches;

Fabric: Moda, mainly Mill House Inn, purchased with the pattern from the lovely ladies at Buttonberry;

Threads: embroidery DMC threads 470,680,733,830,3328,4120, machine quilting Aurifil 2110.

Wadding: "Warm & White" cotton

"country hearts and flowers" quilt

This is my "hearts" quilt finished at last.
The design is not mine, but the choice of colours is. The colours are based around the blue fabric (here used mainly for borders and backing). I have a stash of "modrotisk", traditional blue print fabric from the central Europe, so it was nice to use some of it at last. I enjoyed making this quilt very much, it has so many different blocks and some embroidery and buttons as embelishments.
I have stitched a sleeve on the back of the quilt and it is now hanging on our hall wall.