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Welcome to my blog about my quilting journey! I started quilting in 2006 with a quilt of my own design which started as a cushion cover and ended up as a single bed sized quilt! Now I'm totally hooked....maybe obsessed is a better word for it.

Tuesday 17 February 2015

Rainbow Lattice - February UFO, tick!

Well here we are on the 17th February and I've finished this month's UFO already! Feeling pretty pleased with myself, although to be fair its not a massive quilt (60" square) and I had already stitched in the ditch between the blocks. Nevertheless a finish is a finish!

As a recap on how this quilt came about, I took part in a rainbow charm swap a couple of years ago and wanted a project to show off the rainbow.  I had a block in mind and knew I wanted to use black and grey so off I went to Spotlight and as luck would have it found this fabulous grey/black print. I could not have found a better fabric for what I had in mind.

After fiddling about for far too long picking just the right colours from the charms I had and then auditioning various layouts:

I settled on my final layout as I felt it let the rainbow squares be the stars of the show!
The finished top:
When it came to the quilting I stitched in the ditch between the blocks with grey and then decided to use these lovely threads which I won early last year in a Quilt Block Swap Australia giveaway. 
I matched the colour of the thread with the colour in the centre of the blocks and only quilted the grey side of each block.  The quilting was quite difficult to photograph as the fabric its on is quite busy! Hopefully you can see it well enough.


As for binding I toyed with the idea of having two sides black and two sides in the grey but didn't fancy having to deal with getting the corners right and so decided black was the way to go. The binding is all machine stitched and finished with a diamond shaped stitch in Aurifil Dove grey.


Here is the finished quilt, my Rainbow Lattice:
I do love this quilt and plan to write a tutorial for it. It will be my first tutorial so a landmark for me I guess!  Ooops, nearly forgot to show you the back, here it is:
The main fabric is a Sock Monkey fabric which looks knitted
 and the other is a sort of wavy rainbow.
One more photo for good measure!
Oh do you like the box I used to hold all my threads while I was quilting? Any idea what sort of a box it is?

Its a Ferrero Rocher box! The choccies were nice but I think it looks so pretty with all the coloured threads inside instead and it was a great way to keep all the threads I was using for this project together in one place. I just wish I could figure out how to get the label off without damaging the plastic so it looks better.
Are you like me and see any new container as potential quilting storage too?

Now my hubby and I are off to take my mother in law away for the last week in February for a holiday at the beach at Port Broughton.  Looking forward to a relaxing week away so I can come back all rested and ready to get cracking on March's UFO project.

Thanks for visiting my blog today,

Sunday 1 February 2015

Another Month Bites the Dust!

Good grief, its February already! How did that happen?  Well at least I was able to tick off my UFO for January and I had some time left over to play with another project.  Although I did get the opportunity to start early on the next UFO as Marti let me know it would be Project No. 1 when I sent her photos of January's results, I chose to do a bit more on another UFO I have been tinkering with on and off during 2014, my Star Value blocks:


You can find the tutorial for these blocks over at Happy Quilting.

Early last year I went ahead and cut all the pieces I would need for these blocks ready for its turn last year but its number came up when I was in the middle of my brother's quilt and so I put it aside.  In December and January I have been pottering along joining bits and pieces together and have now managed to put together four more blocks and have also got chunks of the remaining segments done ready for when its number comes up this year.

These are the blocks I finished today:




A minor hiccup though when I laid them on the floor when I noticed the last block wasn't in quite the right order, so a quick session of reverse stitching and ..... ta dah! 


Here they are together:

and here are all the blocks I've made so far.

I love the secondary pattern that forms with the grey diamonds! I also love that almost all these pieces came from my scraps, other than the grey fabrics as it was a colour that I didn't have in my stash when I started these blocks so I've been adding some as I've found some that I like.  My only regret would be that I wish I had made the slightly larger size option of 16" blocks as there is a lot of pieces in each block and they do take a while to make. These are 12.5" blocks.

So that's me done for January. My UFO project for February is to finish quilting my rainbow quilt and also to write the pattern.

Its already sandwiched and stitched in the ditch around each block and I know what I want to do to finish it so hopefully it shouldn't take too long!

Thanks for visiting today,