The perfect mini?

My Boogie Woogie Baby quilt was well received by my friend last week. So this now gives me time to press on with my first mini quilt.

What is a mini quilt? I hear you ask.Well it’s a quilt that measures no more than about 24″ x 24″, it is often then used as a wall hanging, or for decorative purposes.

Why make one? Well apparently they are fun to make ( I’ve yet to get to that stage!), but they are a more manageable size than a regular quilt!

The reason I am looking at mini quilts is because I joined  the Modern Quilt Guild a couple of months ago and they are holding a mini quilt swap which I entered. I got given a name of a fellow quilter somewhere in the world with details of what he/she likes, colours, styles etc, and I have to make a mini quilt for them. Meanwhile someone else has all my details and is making a mini quilt for me. Simple!

It is done in secret so you shouldn’t tell the person you are making for, that you are their swap partner. So thereby hangs a tale. I got my swap partners details in mid October, and then participants are meant to post what is known as a “mosaic” to Instagram showing the sorts of quilts that they like.

So this was my first mosaic.

This was my second mosaic. Do you think my swap partner has a clear idea of what I like?

This is to help their swap partner decide what sort of design/colours to use. I started to follow my swap partner, almost stalking really, but still no mosaic has appeared. I have to send the quilt to my partner by early February 2017, so plenty of time right?

Wrong!

What with full time work, Christmas approaching and then January being one of my busiest months at school I feel I need to get it sorted as soon as possible. But that is often easier said than done!

I really like this miniquilt from Sugaridoo but I gave it a bit of a go and I am just too inexperienced at Foundation Paper Piecing to make a success of it at this stage!

Because I so want my swap partner to like my choice of mini quilt, it has just been research, research, research. It is what I tell my students at school all the time and now I have had to follow my own advice. I have looked at large quilts, small quilts, easy quilts, and difficult quilts. Pinterest and Instagram have become my best buddies.

You know what a fan I am of half square triangles, so I decided to try a variation on a theme which I have called “rush hour”, so called because I think the arrows look as if they are cars in a busy traffic jam. But although I shall finish it off I don’t think I shall be sending this one to my swap partner.

This reminds me of the busiest time of the working day “rush hour”.

Instead I have decided to use this as an opportunity to improve my skills, and hopefully as my swap partner is the same skill level as me they will appreciate the hard work and turmoil that has gone into their mini quilt.

I’m not going to show you what I am attempting. But I’m going to have a proper attempt at Foundation Paper Piecing. Here are the pattern pieces.

It’s just as well that I like puzzles.

Watch this space!

Rima

x

Boogie Woogie Baby – The Great Pretender.

So firstly I want to apologize for my two week absence. It wasn’t deliberate. The first weekend I had a Counsellors Conference in Nairobi, Kenya. I hadn’t been to Kenya before and so was excited to go but the flight was at 01.45 which didn’t fill me with excitement, added to which I was only going to be there for 48 hours.

All Careers Counsellors from Zimbabwe. What a great bunch of girls.

Anyway I went, learned a lot, drank some wine and had a generally nice time with my colleagues.

Then last weekend, which was a long weekend here I went down with a flu/bug which hit me like a bus!

I always wear a Fitbit and usually succeed in hitting my 10,000 steps. But not last week, on Friday I managed 800 steps, mind you I didn’t eat anything either so I suppose it balanced out. I was off work for two days and could barely sit up let alone do anything else.

Why is it whenever I am sick and have to take time off work, I am not the sort of sick where I still feel well enough to quilt?

Fortunately, I had already started to write about my current WIP and so now that I feel more like my usual self I thought I would let you see what I’ve been up to.

My recent success at the Zimbabwe Quilt Show left me with a dilemma as I had made the quilt as a gift for a friend of mine, Karen, who recently gave birth to her second child, a girl, Hannah. I decided that I didn’t want to part with my quilt, so I told Karen that I would make her another to replace it.

Fortunately she had recently decided on the design for the nursery and had chosen Harlequin’s What A Hoot in the colour range Pink, Aqua, Apple and Natural.

Notice the eight white squares where the Applique will go.

Armed with this information I decided to make her quilt with a nod to these colours and my variation of some appliquéd animals. I still went with the half square triangles and decided to put the appliquéd panel towards the bottom centre of the quilt.

I attached the birds to the fabric using “Heat and Bond”.

Added some sequins and don’t look too closely at the Applique. My satin stitch DEFINITELY needs work!

On my original quilt I did a facing but decided to bind this one with pink fabric with white polka dots. Again I used straight line quilting but decided to practice my free motion quilting around the appliqué. Not brilliant but getting better C+!

Straight line quilting in the main body of the quilt and then a little bit of free motion around the appliqué.

I called it Boogie Woogie Baby as the complimentary fabric to Harlequin’s What A Hoot is a multi stripe and it’s called Boogie Woogie, so I thought that was a cute name for the quilt.

I am seeing Karen on Monday and I know she is excited to see the finished quilt. I hope she enjoys using it as much as I’ve enjoyed making it.

Made with love ❤️.

Rima

x

 

My First Show Quilt.

It is almost a year since my visit to the Patchwork and Quilters Zimbabwe Show 2015. A year since I became addicted to quilting. In that year I have made a whole new group of friends, strong, creative, supportive women that I am honoured to be associated with.

The Show is hosted in Harare and in Bulawayo on alternate years and this year it is the turn of Bulawayo. I am a bit sad, because work commitments mean that I won’t be able to fly down and see it. But this hasn’t stopped me and I have decided to enter my first quilt for judging this year.

The design I have used is by Marie Joerger and I found it on Pinterest. I used a Riley Blake Charm Pack (For the non quilters a Charm Pack is a pack of five inch square precut squares). To this I added some off white Zimbabwean cotton. Then I had to add in a few other fabrics, some plains, some Kaffe Fassett, anything that I thought looked okay.

A mixture of Riley Blake charm pack and other odds and ends.

I cut the blocks into half square triangles and cut some two and a half inch squares for the middle of the heart motif.

Everything looks fine so far!

I pieced the top and was happy with it apart from the heart.

The pieced top.

The heart didn’t look precise enough. Too lumpy bumpy!

You can see that the squares are not quite straight.

I took it to sewing group, thinking that it was one or two of the squares that were the problem. In the end I had to do a complete heart transplant, taking out the core of the heart and resewing. It is a horrible feeling, when you have a beautifully pieced top sitting on your lap with a huge hole in it. I was so worried that all the bits wouldn’t go back together nicely. But perseverance paid off and I am so happy that I did the extra work.

I knew that I wanted to straight line quilt and didn’t want to follow the regular chevron pattern. I also knew that I wanted to do a variation on the heart to make it stand out.

I quilted the heart using the width of my walking foot.

I quilted the bulk of the quilt using a walking foot with a seam guide, (kindly lent to me by my friend Ala) and the heart using the width of my walking foot.

I was really pleased with the finished look on the heart.

Even the back looks pretty!

I used a rainbow stripe flannel for the backing.

I decided face the quilt rather than bind it and found the tutorial on The Silly Boodilly website, helped reinforce what I had learned at Quilters Guild.

Check out the teeny tiny stitches. This was hours of hand sewing!

I made the required channel for the back of the quilt so that it can be displayed properly. I dare say the show organizers will probably thread a broomstick through the channel. We had covered this at a recent Quilter’s Guild workshop, but I found this tutorial on The Inquiring Quilter and it really helped.

I also printed off a cute label to meet the show requirements.

I really do love colour.

All I can do now is hope that the quilt is well received, that the judges are not too harsh and that the people viewing my work love it as much as I do.

The show is on at the end of September, so watch this space as I will let you in on any critique that I receive.

Rima

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