Let the Liberation Begin!

Well, I made it to the Festival of Quilts and yes, it was awesome and no, one day wasn't enough. But this year I prioritised seeing the exhibition quilts (I did take photos, but not sure of the copyright issues of putting them on the interwebs) over and above checking out all the stalls, so came home with a relatively modest amount of stuff:



Mostly some delicious Kona solids from the Simply Solids stall, plus a spotty Kaffe layer cake, and a charm pack...and yes, I succumbed to the Farmer's Wife Sampler Quilt book! I have been studying the blocks and a lot can be liberated by using corner cover triangles for HST and flying geese type units; or cut wonkily by stacking fabrics; and some could be made conventionally but oversized and then wonkified by recutting on the slant. It's going to be a fun project for sure :-)

And I made a start on it today. Here are my first two blocks. First up, Autumn Tints:



As you can maybe tell, I messed up with the placement of my four patches, but ho-hum, this is a liberated version and I like the way they look, so I won't be getting out the seam ripper!!

Second up is Big Dipper:



Love how it turned out :-)

I can't quite believe that I have managed to keep up with the ICAD challenge, although I admit some days it hasn't been easy:



and then the boys show me up with their creativity (first by Gman, second by Waif):



We will definitely keep going until the end of August. But after that, I think we will all be desperate to create something BIG!

Houses, Rust n Holes in Hearts

This week on my design wall floor:



Now that I have finished Gman's quilt top, it's time to turn to Waif's. The planned layout is a strip of wonky fences, then house blocks, then more wonky fences, more houses, lastly a strip of wonky fences. So I can see from laying it out that I need to make a load more fences. Then I can sew the middle together and see what I need in the way of borders.

I've made a start on my next Christmas present for Allie's Christmas Through the Year. It's going to be made into a name panel for my nephew Ewan. I am just loving this crazy swirly orange fabric:



I have also had some fun rust dyeing a few bits and pieces for my next journal quilt. I collected together some random fabrics - white patterned quilting cotton, wadding, open weave cotton, ricrac and lace - laid them in an old washing up bowl and covered with random rusty stuff - old washers, nails, a toy car, plus some steel wool:



Next, five year old Waif enjoyed spraying them with a mixture of vinegar and water:



Then we placed the tray in a bin bag, weighted down with some books and left overnight.

Next day, we had an assortment of rust dyed fabrics to play with:





To set the dye, we soaked in a salt water mix, then washed as usual.

I was disappointed with the quilting cotton, this didn't really take on much of the rust but just LOVE the effect on the open weave cotton, the wadding and the lace.

I am going to integrate some of these pieces into my next journal quilt, which I have made a start on:


You might also notice the holey burnt hearts. Yes, I have a new toy - a heat gun :-). Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Ode to Tonya

As all liberated quilters will know, today sees the release of Tonya "Lazy Gal" Ricucci's first book "Word Play Quilts". Aside from Gwen Marston herself, Tonya has got to be the most influential liberated quilter about. Certainly, if I hadn't stumbled across her wonky house tutorial, I never would have discovered liberated quilting, never would have joined and been inspired by the fabulous Liberated Quilters yahoo group, met the wonderful Clare, and made a start on my liberated village. So, if you are not familiar with Tonya's stuff, step on over to her blog, then order your copy of Word Play Quilts!

To complete my ode to Tonya, here are pics of all my Tonya-inspired wonky houses in all their glory:






I can't wait to get my sticky mitts on a copy of Word Play Quilts and I am sure you will be seeing some free pieced letters on this blog very soon :-)

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!

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!