Starting something new

After a week of hand quilting and playing with my denim bits (still ongoing) I felt ready yesterday to start piecing again. This is going to be for my oldest son and I started with this piece of fabric:

He's a city person through and through, so New York felt like a good starting point.  Here's my first run through stash looking for black/grey fabrics. (Sorry for blurry photo!)

The little squares are from an Oakshott charm pack and I think I'm going to use them to sneak some colour in.  Apart from them I'm going monochrome - he decided black and red were his colours when he was about 6 and nothing much has changed since then.  It'll be interesting to see if I can restrain myself and keep to this palette or whether I crack at some point down the line!

Linking up with Needle and Thread Thursday.

Things I've learned #3

Strictly speaking I think the next one in this series should be "always put the cover back on your rotary cutter" (I know, I know) but that is pretty much self-explanatory, like "don't run with scissors" so I shall move swiftly on to "don't decide too much too quickly". This applies, for me at least, to both colour choices and to design decisions.  

So, pick some fabrics, but keep an open mind; sometimes you need something unexpected and you can only see this as you go along. Equally, even if you have an idea of how you think your quilt is going to look, be open to things changing. I usually know when I start roughly what I think I'm doing but the finished quilt sometimes bears no resemblance to where I started.  

Some examples:

In Two Hungry Birds the flying geese only occurred to me about a third of the way through;

In this one I had a pile of beautiful, carefully chosen reds and purples, but added in the little scraps of turquoise from stash;

 And when I started this, the little elephant was going to be the centre of some version of a medallion quilt.

I guess the gist of what I'm saying is that if everything is planned and decided up front, you know what you are going to get, but for me part of the fun is to let the quilt tell me what to do as I go along, to watch what is happening, think about what is missing (or surplus), keep changing the plan, and to trust that the end result will be satisying.

Linking up with Show and Tell Tuesday at i have to say.

Quilting the blues # 1

When I posted the beginnings of this piece here, I said that it was the start of an ongoing project, collaborating with my sister.  There was no pressure, no hurry as we are not getting together to look at the next stages until Christmas.  But then I got a bit carried away.  I had meant to spend this week quilting my Charley Harper top, but it has languished untouched because I have been having far too much fun doing this.

This is the finished piece - I'll need to think at some point about the unfinished edges, but here I've just layered them over each other and stitched them down however the fancy took me.  Practical questions aside though I'm very happy with the look of it.

Linking up with Kathy's Quilts for Slow Sunday Stitching and ayliN-Nilya for Monday Makers.

Saturday photos

I'm still feeling autumnal and this year am definitely going through an orange-loving phase.  Actually it's blooming cold today and probably more like winter but I'm going to put that thought out of my mind for as long as is reasonably possible.

Things I've learned # 2

This is the second in a short series of posts reflecting on the things I have learned along my quilting journey that have made the most impact on how I work and that I hope might be interesting. 

This is an idea I also came across first in The Fabric Makes the Quilt (as mentioned last week) but that has been reinforced many times: if it's too small, add a bit on, if it's too big, chop a bit off.

The way this works for me is that I rarely buy more than half a metre of any fabric, even things that might be classed as blenders/basics. Of course I often get to a point where I  wish I had just a few inches more of something, but the trick is not to cave in and buy more.  Instead I have to go back to stash and find something similar enough, if I have it.  If I don't, then I have to make it work with a fabric I wouldn't otherwise have considered, or resort to searching through my scrapbag and piecing together tiny bits to make up the shortfall. Take a good look at the borders on this one:

Generally the 'chop a bit off' part of this approach I find pretty easy while the 'add a bit on' side can be more challenging, but once you get the hang of it, it stops being scary and becomes quite exciting and satisfying - definitely worth having a go!

Linking up with Lorna for Let's Bee Social.

Birds and the blues

As mentioned on Friday I have broken my usual rule this week (one quilt in the hoop, one being pieced, nothing more) ans added in a new little project.  

My sister and I have been talking over the idea of making some sort of coat/jacket inspired by Japanese boro and by French denim workwear.  This is in its very earliest stages and given that we live a couple of hours apart is not going to move along that quickly, but I have started playing around with scraps from old jeans.

I'm also still working away at quilting Charley Harper, which currently looks like this:

It seems to be moving along quite fast, though this is probably mostly because the last couple of things I quilted were on the large side, and this is quite a bit smaller.  

Linking up with Kathy's Quilts for Slow Sunday Sewing.  

Saturday photos

This week, in keeping with Friday's post, it's all about the blues.