WIDRN Wednesday: the one with peacocks!

I swear this is one of the fastest quilts I've ever made. Less than a month from pieces to full top!

The Communique Quilt is a pattern set up by Andrea of Mouse In My Pocket and I've had this fabric collection (centered around the Timeless Treasures Plume collection of 2013) for, well, a decade and change. I added a few extra fabrics to it - at least one of them is from 'Valley of Kings', a Robert Kaufman collection of the same vintage as Plume - and popped in a blender or two, and a solid here and there.

I laid out a few blocks to get a feel for the design, and in the end just decided to go for it.

And boy howdy!

It seemed once I'd started putting this together, I couldn't stop. I've spent almost every spare hour on this thing since I started, all the way up until Sunday night when I finished the last seam. WHEW.

An initial problem with the quilt is that the pattern has finished block sizes, and I forgot that... Cue me cutting all the peacock blocks a half-inch too small! ARGH! So I ended up having to put borders around them all and...I think it works better in fact! The framing really draws the eye to the block, highlighting the panels in a way that the other 'panel pieces' (the butterflies) don't get. And the colours are just a beautiful mix - azure and gold and aqua and jet.

The pattern size was for a 'throw', but even that was pretty huge, so I took two twelve-inch-high sections out of it (the quilt is built in rectangles, so you can pieces bits of it and then sew them together) and replaced the second 16" block with another panel and some more blocks. I had some blocks pieced, but they just didn't work for the quilt. I'm using them in a 'remainders' quilt with the rest of the scraps from these two quilts. And there are still scraps, of course. There are always scraps...

I took various pictures of them by internal lights at night, a few bad ones during a morning where there wasn't enough sun, and then I just took them outside and photographed them against the neighbour's hedge. I think I might end up doing that more often with my quilts, especially the large ones!

It was going to be for a couple of cousins, but after B1 saw it, she was all "Ooh, I'd like it!" And I figured that I haven't given her and B2 matching quilts yet, so they're getting these two and the cousins can have something else.

I'm kinda glad that they're going to the twins rather than the cousins, tbh. I'll make something else for the cousins...

WIDRN Wednesday: finishes and quilt shows and new starts

It's been pretty quiet on the sewing front through May, which I knew it was going to be (see last post) because I was going to be emotionally and mentally busy.

After the Australian election, I had to go away for work for two weeks, and while I took a little bit of handsewing, I knew that I wasn't going to get much done, so only finished up one handsewing star.

Then, right at the start of June, I submitted two quilts for the Sydney Quilt Show. They're nothing special - one is from the two quilts that I did with the fractured stars, and the other one is an old scraps-from-another-quilt that I called "It Is Easy Being Green". I really need to get my ass in gear faster for the Australian Quilt Show (which is a different beast altogether), but I'm just not really keeping up with all the quilt shows anymore. Or the making of quilts.

At some point earlier in the year I'm pretty sure I joined a quilt along... Except that I can't seem to find the email. (Okay, went and found it in my instagram messages - Make Modern, Issue 64, has an exclusive quilt-along - the Moon Diamond quilt.

But then I also started a new quilt last night!

The fabrics are various patterns and prints, but mostly around Timeless Treasures' PLUME collection (at least ten years old). I've held onto it for ages, not knowing how to use them, and then I spotted the Communique Quilt Pattern by Mouse In My Pocket and it seemed perfect for this.

Except that I started cutting...then realised I'd cut the blocks too small - the pattern sizing on the printout is the FINISHED block, and I made no allowances for seams. *facepalm* So now I'm adding framing to the blocks, which will make them stand out, sure, but is also adding one more thing to the process.

This is actually going to be two quilts in matched style - I'm thinking they might suit the C1 cousins better - E1 and G2 - in terms of something that they'd use, rather than the 'stars' quilts I just made, which I explicitly linked to the quilt I gave E1's daughter, but which aren't their style at all (IMO).

Also, cousin A5 is getting married in August, after her brother M4 got married two years ago. And their brother N3 got married, uh, at least twenty five years ago. He's my age and got at least one adult kid and another that's about to turn 18 (I think). Eesh.

I've been planning to get their quilts done for YEARS now. I guess this is the kick in the pants that I needed.

(ps. I have no idea how I've previously referenced the names of my cousins. It's all confusing - C1/E1, C2/G2, C3/N3, etc. All the way down to M6, P7, K8, P9...)

Did some handsewing on Saturday with a local quilt group meet-up. The Restless Hands Of Sel quilt is slowly progressing. Slooooowly.

It sheds papers like a chicken sheds feathers at moulting time and is an absolute mess to carry around. Eep.

And then on Monday, I decided I was going to finish a quilt by binding it - I can't remember what I called this. La Luna fabric by Tula Pink, and the Penny Patch quilt pattern:

Another quilt that I'm going to keep because I like the fabric. At least, I'm going to keep it right now. B1 doesn't like it much - she thinks the staring ladies are creepy. (She doesn't know about Día de los Muertos and sugar skulls.)

One more quilt to bind in the collection - need to work out what binding for that one - a Tula Pink Neptune quilt. Don't think I have enough of the darker shades of Neptune to do the entire border.