Back in Black (and red)

Well, I finally got round to completing the flying geese borders for Gman's red and black quilt. I am loving the way it looks so far but it's not quite big enough yet, so not sure what to add to bring it up to size...any ideas?!? It is wide enough, but needs to be longer, so looking at adding top and bottom borders.

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..?

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.