Two New Quilts

Since I wrote my last blog post our whole lives, and yours too I am sure, have been turned upside down by the Corona Virus crises.  I planned to write a post today about the things I am doing to deal with all the changes and keep parts of my business going. But after a week of constant change and the need to react to so much new information I am just feeling a little too overwhelmed by everything to attempt this.

So I will write this in a few days (as things are still changing rapidly here in the UK) and will instead share with you two new quilts that feature in newly published magazines.

First up is my Moroccan Tile Quilt, featured in the latest issue of Today’s Quilter (60).

The editor of the magazine had recently traveled to Morocco and been inspired by all the beautiful tiles to commission a quilt design. She sent me a lot of images she had taken of different tiles and I started to design a few quilts based on these. As I couldn’t decide which one I liked best I combined them into this row quilt which luckily Nikki liked the best.

The actual tiles were all in very bright primary colours like yellow and green which didn’t really work for this magazine, so I chose a palette of red, blue, white and aqua which gave it a bit of a Scandi feel too.

I’m always looking for new FMQ patterns as I don’t like repeating myself. I wanted a curvy overall pattern to counteract all the geometric piecing patterns and after a bit of doodling I came up with this large circle with three petals inside.  I thought it would be relatively quick to do.  But I was so wrong!! It took me absolutely ages, at least twice as long as I normally take. And it wasn’t just me being slow as I went right through a whole 1300M Aurifil 50wt spool and on to a new one, something that’s never happened before! Something about the design was deceptively heavy to quilt.

But I do LOVE the way it looks so I guess it was worth it (I can say this now, but at the time…).

I usually give every new quilt it’s very own blog post. All my quilts have a story and I like to give that space by writing about it here. But I was so busy with QuiltCon last month that I totally missed writing about this next quilt.

This Lone Star Block quilt was featured in the previous issue of Today’s Quilter (59) and is made entirely with Moda Grunge fabric in what I like to think of as an ‘icy pastel’ palette.

The inspiration behind this one was the quilt on the left from an old book about Mennonite quilts. It has this extra aspect of a triangle between each ‘arm’ of the star. I tried a few years back to make this a viable pattern with ‘y seams’ but it was unsuccessful. Perhaps I will try again with an EPP version. However I still thought I could get the essence of the quilt with just the small lone star blocks.

The placement of the colours mean that the blocks appear quite different from each other, on first sight they could be mistaken for completely different blocks altogether.

The quilt was made late summer last year and my sewing machine foot pedal broke just before I started to quilt it.

I sent the pedal back to the supplier but didn’t have time to wait for a replacement as (of course) I was too close to deadline. So I actually managed to FMQ this by using only the stop/start button on my Janome 9400.

Luckily I had chosen this ‘kissing stars’ pattern with short straightish lines rather than something curvy. I’m still pretty proud of myself for managing it though!

I really hope seeing these pretty quilts has managed to divert you a little from the current challenging issues facing us all. I know I’ve enjoyed sharing them with you.

Keep safe everyone and follow the scientific advice of your governments and regions. I’ll be back with an update post very soon.