Temperature Quilts for 2024 and a Moxie upgrade!

I have temperature quilt projects to share and exciting news about the new Moxie XL!

Regular readers will know all about my passion for Temperature Projects. You can read about my original Weather Bubble quilt here and since then I’ve completed a temperature embroidery and started (and then aborted!) a temperature crochet blanket. I’ve started a new project for 2024 (above) but I also have a first quilt finish for 2024, the Sea Urchin Temperature Quilt for 2022, to share with you!

First of all let’s discuss 2024. This new project will be…

A fabric book! Of course!! A great way to combine my two biggest current obsessions!

I am stitching 2″ (finished) blocks, with the lowest temperature on the background and the highest on the organic circle. These are attached through hand sewn needle-turn applique. This is like a mini version of the Weather Bubble quilt except I am using all linen/woven type fabrics.

To make things a bit different this year I am also recording daily weather through a stitching code. You can see the different running stitches and knots I’m using, well basically they correspond to…

Sunny: running stitch around the circle, Cloudy: running stitch inside the circle, Rainy: knots inside the circle. There will also be Snowy: knots outside the circle (if we get some!).

I’m using either white or black thread, which ever contrasts best with the fabric colour. The thread is Aurifil 12wt wool as shown in the photo to the left for scale.

16 blocks will make one page and I will need 24 for a book.This means I can sew the blocks together once 16 days have passed, this will really help with organisation throughout the year.

I’m super excited about this project and race to find out the temperature on the BBC weather app every morning.

The only thing is I won’t have a finished book until January 2025!!

But there is another way to make a Temperature Quilt without having to wait so long…

Last July I took a few weeks off from ‘work’ and started a new temperature quilt for 2022. This meant I had all the data already so I could just get on and finish the quilt rather than working on it day by day as I had before. I finished the top in a week but then never got around to quilting it until now.  I could have sworn that I had actually written a blog post all about this at the time but no, I clearly hadn’t! So here is some more information.

The tricky thing with temperature quilts is the quilt maths required to make 365 days fit into a grid.  I had the (frankly genius IMHO!) idea to use improv piecing to get around this. Each of the blocks is a month and they snake from left to right in horizontal rows (so January with it’s freakishly hot New Year’s Day is top left and December is bottom right). The problem is that each month has a different amount of days and this is where the clever improv piecing comes in as I am using my Freehand Foundation Piecing technique which involves me drawing up the pattern on to a foundation. Therefore I can draw some months with 31 days and February with 28! Find my Freehand Foundation Piecing tutorial here.

The blocks are about 16”. That’s January on the left and the first four months on the right.

The top part of the wedge is the hottest temperature and the bottom part is the lowest and each wedge is a day.

Solids are a mix of Dashwood Pop Solids and Kona Solids. The background is  Dashwood Pop Raven.

Because I was planning on continuing with the temperature blanket I had started in 2022 I had continued to record temperature data up until June (despite only actually crocheting the month of January!). Then a lovely thing happened, my son bought us a weather station!  I realised that all the data would be recorded here so stopped taking daily readings from the BBC weather app.

However when I started this quilt and tried to hook up my weather station to the Weather website to get the remaining data I found I couldn’t get it to work (probably because of my terrible broadband), so instead I took the data from a weather station 10 minutes from my house which was on the site. You can find all the historic data you need from this website, it’s a fantastic resource if you are planning a quilt or miss a day on your recording.

September was my favourite month out of all the blocks as it encompasses so many of the colours (left).

Something I completely missed from my first quilt was a ‘legend’, a key showing all the temperatures used in the quilt.

I present a lecture on this subject so have seen many examples of these, some with degrees embroidered on to the colours.  Most of these end up on the back of the quilt but I had seen one which was used in the binding. I wanted to try this so made a strip of all the colours used (top right). But then I realised that I would want to face bind this quilt and that was going to make this tricky.

So I actually pieced the legend strip into the block before quilting as you can see above.

In my last post I talked about a new quilting style I was developing called Modern Improv Doodle and I shared a sneak peek of this quilt in progress. I took my time with this quilt (around 5 hours) and added lots of fun details to the basic patterns.

I’m really chuffed with my quilting on this one. After about a decade of practicing FMQ I feel like I am finally producing something I am happy with! This really is the best quilting I have ever done and it feels like an achievement to have got to this point.

And one of the main reasons I’ve been able to improve my quilting so much is surely down to my beloved Moxie long arm machine. So if I tell you that I am about to say goodbye to it and send it back you will be very surprised I’m sure!

The reason is simple… I am getting a new machine, the Moxie XL! Hooray! This new version of the Moxie has a much increased throat space of 18″ plus quite a few other upgraded features such as a touch screen.

The first couple of machines have just arrived in the UK and mine will be delivered next week, eeek! I will be back to tell you much more about the new features once I’ve had a chance to try it out. But in the meantime I wanted to share the Pre-order offer from the UK distributor Pinhole Quilting.

They have a special Moxie XL launch Offer until 31st January 2024. This gives customers £250 off the list price of £7,495 plus you will get £250 of accessories (ruler base, rulers, etc) if you put a deposit of £500 down by 31st January 2024.

AND if you use my exclusive referral code you will also get £100 of accessories for your machine (TBC which ones). Just use code JA2024 when placing your order.

You can find out more about all this on the Pinhole Quilting website here. If you have any questions at all please do let Liz and Pete know, they are so friendly and helpful. Or feel free to ask me, either in the comments below or via email.