Small Town Quilt

I just finished sewing a new quilt. The main block is a pinwheel, with strips and squares around it. The quilt pattern came from Sew magazine.

I've called the finished quilt 'Little Town' due to the cute little houses, hills, bicycles and flowers on the fabrics.

Baby Travel Quilt

Another baby travel quilt - this one in oranges, greens and blues. This was made to order - the request was for something bright & colourful, gender neutral, and with animal print fabric.

The Backing I used was a flannel baby crib sheet, and it felt so soft! The colours help make this quilt light and bright, and suitable for boys or girls. I quilted it freehand in a spiral.

Quilted Cushion

My Mum asked me to recover an old cushion for her. she is decorating the spare room in blues & cream/white tones and wanted the new cover to match this scheme. After looking through my old copies of Love Patchwork magazine she selected the most complicated patchwork cushion design in there for her new cover!

The fabrics were all ones I already had. The patchwork design itselt was complicated, and I'll admit that I couldn't see how it was all going to come together when I was laying it out, but I followed the step by step instructions and slowly the design emerged!

I'm really thrilled with the end result, and more importantly so is Mum!

Gender Neutral Baby Quilt

I'm starting to make more items to sell, which is exciting, but also quite daunting! I'm trying to appeal to a wide range of tastes while also staying true to my ethos of 'Vintage Bee' - vintage style, quirky and original items.

This baby quilt is intended to be gender neutral. In my opinion far too much baby stuff is either blue or pink, it gets a bit boring and stereotypical. This cute cream fabric was an ebay purchase. The squares on it are tiny and took me ages to sew around but I love the finished effect!

As you can see, I've started adding by Bee label to items for sale! This quilt is for sale on my Vintage Bee Facebook page.

Nautical Cushion

I had some patchwork pieced together and left over from a recent baby quilt I made. It was a big enough piece to be used as part of something else, so I decided to make it into a cushion cover.

I love this nautical themed fabric. It came from Trago Mills for the bargain price of £2.16 a metre! Such a great place to get fabric.

The cushion is a simple slip cover style. I think it's pretty gender neutral too with its red and blues.

Lou's Baby Quilt

My lovely friend Lou is expecting her first baby this summer. She will just be the most wonderful mum, and I wanted to make her something special for her daughter.

Using fabrics from my stash pile I made her a patchwork baby quilt. Even though she's having a girl I didn't want to make it too pink, as I think this gets a bit boring - plus Lou is a classy lady! ;)

The backing fabric came from Ikea - my current favourite place to get fabrics, especially for quilt backing. Because Lou doesn't have a name planned yet rather than sewing on a quilt label I stitched on a small heart. All made with love!

Remixed Flying Geese - Quilt in Progress

The finished quilt top

I'm still working on my 'remixed flying geece' quilt. It's huge! I'm making the Queen size version, in the hope that Ash & Bronwyn won't be able to steal all the quilt that way! Unfortunately the quilt is now so big that I don't have room in my house to lay it out to pin! I took it into school so I could use the huge tables in Textiles. One of my lovely pupils Ellie helped me pin it all out & it took the two of us an hour to do!

I've finished the quilt top - phew! - and have sandwiched it together with the wadding & backing. I've used Ikea fabric for the backing, white with grey writing, which worked out at the very reasonable price of £12 for the whole back. 

My job now is to quilt through the whole lot, which is taking AGES! I'm using free motion embroidery in a random scribble pattern in order to contrast with the straight lines of all those triangles. 

Photos of the finished quilt will go up once I'm done - currently I still have a third of the quilting to do and a very sore pair of arms from pulling all that fabric around!

Lap Quilt

Our house is pretty cold most of the time as we have no heating apart from a log burner in the front room. Therefore I thought it was high time I made a lap quilt for snuggling under while watching tv. 

The design is just simple patchwork squares in gold, mustard & blue. I particularly love this 'Lady Sybil' Downton Abbey fabric:

The back is a tablecloth I picked up in a charity shop for £1.50 - bargain! I've quilted it in a 'sunbeam' pattern using free machine embroidery. 

As with most things in our house, Bronwyn now thinks it belongs to her!

Quilting workshop

At the weekend I did another course at the excellent Makery in Bath. This time it was Quilting for Beginners.

Yet again the course was great, the instructor was friendly, easy to follow and happy to answer questions and discuss issues. During the afternoon we each made a patchwork notebook cover, and through the stages I was able to ask plenty of questions about my own quilt making.

The notebook covers were made by sewing six strips from jelly rolls together, quilting this onto calico backing and fitting it to the size of the notebook. I then sewed two seams on the top and bottom, trimmed off the excess fabric and wadding and then made binding to edge the cover.

Grey Flying Geese Quilt

I've started a new quilt. This one is going to be for our bedroom, and I've chosen to use various grey patterned fabrics in an attempt to make it less 'girlie' for Ash! 

The pattern is free on Robert Kaufman's website - a great place for free patterns, take a look!
http://www.robertkaufman.com/quilting/quilts_patterns/remixed_geese/

I plan to make this a HUGE quilt so that it hangs right down both sides of the bed & we no longer have to fight each other (or Bronwyn!) for warmth!

Patchwork Quilt

 I finally finished my first 'proper' patchwork quilt! I started this back in October, following a quilting book Ash gave me as a present. This block pattern is an Ohio Star (nine patch with quarter-square triangles)

I kept to red, pink & light green for the colours. The paisley fabric is Cath Kidston, and the pink binding is an old skirt that's recycled here. All the rest of the fabric came from ebay.

Daydreamer Lap Quilt

Friends of ours are expecting their first baby, and Ash asked me to make them something baby related for Christmas. The result is this, the 'Daydreamer' lap quilt. The idea is that the mum to be can use it as a quilt while she's expecting, and then once baby comes along it has thick enough padding to be used as either a cot quilt or a playmat on the floor.

The patchwork stripes are remnants of upholstry style fabric that I bought last year in a market in Totnes - I loved the cream, gold, blue & brown colour combinations but until now had never found a project to use them! These were cut & stitched together in stripes.

The clouds themselves are padded and then were quilting stitched onto the stripes background. Then I pinned the wadding and backing fabric to the front, created a border around the edge and stitched (very slowly!) through the whole lot.

Patchwork Quilt

Look how unhappy she is that Bronwyn is sharing her quilt!

All cuddled up with her mum

This Christmas I tried to make as many of the presents I gave to people as possible - a separate post about that coming soon. For my friend's daughter Josie I made my first ever attempt at a patchwork quilt - and as you can see she was thrilled with the results!

The patchwork squares are Cath Kidston fabric I won on ebay. It had already been cut into squares the right size, so that saved me a lot of work! I bought some pink polka dotted cotton (also on ebay) and used part of a duvet inner for the stuffing. 

Now that The Boy got me a book about how to make patchwork quilts for Christmas I plan to have another go at one - without making it up as I go along this time!