When did the village get so big?

I made this house.  It's kind of conventional compared to the others but if you look closely, the bottom half fabric is snakeskin so I guess someone quite wild might live here :-)



I have also been making wonky cross blocks for the border of this quilt.  I like the way they look, sort of a crazy picket fence:



While the boys played the Wii earlier, I made use of Gman's lovely big bedroom floor to lay out all of the blocks and wow, the village is getting pretty big :-).



Not sure how to sew them all together but thought I would add bits to the sides of each house block so I could have columns of equal width to sew together eg one column where everything is 12 inches wide, one 15 inches wide etc.  If I try and vary which side I add the bits to, this shouldn't look too uniform hopefully.  So, now to make some random bits to make blocks up to size :-).  I'm thinking half square triangles, little log cabin blocks, strippy bits...and maybe a few more trees and stars.  What fun!

100 Bags, a Dotty House and a Star is Born

First of all, I have to share my latest liberated house.  It has to be my favourite so far and is also Waif's favourite:



I loved the door so much I made a matching tree :-)

In other news, I have made four more Morsbags which takes Snoozepod's grand total up to 100. Yes, I have made 100 bags.  Woohoo!



I have decided to take a new direction with Gman's black and red quilt.  Since discovering the joy of liberated quiltmaking, the conventional stuff seems, well, a bit boring...so I have sewn together some of the log cabins I have already made into a star formation and I am going to transform into a medallion quilt, taking inspiration from Gwen and Freddy.  I think my first border will have to contain some liberated stars, then who knows where it will go from there..?

11 Days Without Broadband

And yes, I have been sewing!

Bits for Waif's quilt:



More blocks for Gman's log cabin (now have 25)



And of course, a few Morsbags - these are my faves:



Morsbags total is now up to 97, so I think I may have to sew three more pretty soon.

Twinkliest Star

I had a go at a liberated star to match my latest house, and I love it!  I have made stars before, in the conventional way, but this is much more fun and I think it looks better - it twinkles more :-)



Hand Quilting Experiments

Further to my previous post about hand quilting with pearl cottons, I bought me this yummy selection of pearl cotton no.5 size:



When I had finished drooling over them and stroking them, I set to work on hand quilting an orphan Jacob's Ladder block with them:





I didn't have a plan, but just kind of doodled and experimented.  As you can see, I wasn't lying when I said I don't "do" small and neat stitching (you don't even want to know what the back looks like)!!    I did discover that, although I fancy the idea of being spontaneous and unplanned, I actually got on much better when trying to follow a line eg on the black paisley triangle.  I think I overdid the amount of quilting because the overall effect is to make a kind of stiff quilt.  Still, Action Man doesn't seem to mind :-)



For my second experiment, I used pearl no. 8 thread, which I got off Ebay.  I decided to stencil a design first so I could practice following lines.  I grabbed a couple out of the kids art collection - a duck and some little hearts. I did discover that my purple disappearing marker isn't great for this purpose because (a) I can't see the lines on the darker fabrics, and (b) I am not quick enough to keep up with it, half the duck had faded by the time I got round the bend ;-)



I much  prefer the look and especially the feel of this little quilt.  Unfortunately, because I changed more than one factor at the time (thread, needle, wadding, design) I don't know why it feels so much nicer!  The wadding is 100% bamboo (the previous was a cotton/soy blend) but don't know if this is why it feels nicer, or if it is because the stitching is not as dense.  Would be interested to hear from more experienced quilters on this.

Wonky and proud

Well, you didn't think I would stay on the straight and narrow path did you?

Here's a couple of new house blocks I made.  The orange house I deliberately went for a wonky look (made by tipsy builders as Lazy Gal Tonya might have it!).  In fact, they were so tipsy that the roof doesn't even fit, but hey, who needs to worry about an ill-fitting roof when it's raining glitter?





Buoyed by the liberation of making wonky houses, I decided to have another go at dropping the feed dogs and experimenting with a bit of free motion embroidery.  My lovely sister-in-law got me this book for Christmas and I dug it out and had a go at a bit of stitching.  Here are the two fabric postcards I made as a result:



It wasn't as terrifying as I had thought, but actually pretty enjoyable!  And the fabrics were all from my scrap bag, so low risk.  D

I did learn that I need to cut my fabric background a bit bigger cos they have ended up at less than postcard size.  Who knew a bit of embroidery would make them shrink so much?

Hand Quilting vs Machine Quilting

As I mentioned previously, having machine quilted my Army Star quilt, I don't think I will physically be able to manage machine quilting the Jacob's Ladder quilt, so have been looking at advice on hand quilting.  I bought some "between" needles as suggested in the advice I found everywhere but they are very, very tiny and I don't really fancy my chances with them!  So I was intrigued by this post on Anna Maria Horner's website, where she talks about quilting with embroidery floss.  I think this might be much more up my street.  Mentioning this on the Liberated Quilters yahoo group, Dordogne Quilter Clare helpfully pointed me in the direction of this thread guide written by Lazy Gal Tonya.  Now my mind is surely made up!

Lovely, wonky house

I have made my third free pieced house for Waif's quilt and think it's the most liberated yet (possibly aided by a glass of wine or two ;-)).  I pulled out a few random squares and rectangles from my scrap bag for windows and doors and sewed strips of the house fabric around them in a fairly unplanned way, then just fitted them all together at the end.  I particularly like the circular pattern on the downstairs window.  I made the chimney a bit too big, so just sewed another strip of sky on the top to compensate.  Liberated quilting ROCKS :-)

Another House for the Village

Why do I get the feeling that making these little houses might prove a bit addictive?!?



I really like this sky fabric, it reminds me of Van Gogh's Starry Night :-)

A Traditional Log Cabin and a Liberated House!

I have made a start on the boys' quilts and they will be at opposite ends of the quilting spectrum.  Gman's is based on a very traditional quilt block, the log cabin (although I think the dramatic red/black colour scheme makes it modern looking) and Waif's will be a "liberated", free pieced (no measuring, no templates, no perfect quarter inch seams - eek!) village quilt.  Here's pics of each so far:

First four log cabin blocks in various layouts:

[gallery]

First house for Waif's village:

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="First free pieced house for Waif's village quilt"][/caption]