Category: Quilting

Easy As ABC QAL: K, M and O

Easy As ABC QAL

I’m taking part in the Easy As ABC Quilt Along, making five letters a month so that by Christmas I’ll have a finished alphabet quilt.

Except that I’m a bit behind because we went away, so I’ve finished A-E, missed all of August and have just done K, M and O of September’s blocks. October will be a big catch-up month!

I’m sticking with red and blue as my background colours, with different ‘boy’ fabrics for the letters.

K: M: I’m quite proud of this one, I think it looks pretty good 🙂 O:

You can see the other blocks that people have made over on Blossom Heart Quilts.

Modern QAL – September Block

I’m a bit behind as we’ve been away, and haven’t completed August’s block yet, so I think October will be catch-up month!

This month’s block is called Escalator. All of the blocks are taken from this book:

 

I think it’s a pretty looking block and it was quite easy to make. I chose pink, yellow, green and blue to make it in this month.

Here is my finished block:

I’m linking up over on And Sew We Craft. You can see the other blocks that people have entered there too 🙂

 

 

This post contains affiliate links.

Easy As ABC QAL: A-E

Easy As ABC QAL

I’m taking part in the Easy As ABC Quilt Along, making five letters a month so that by Christmas I’ll have a finished alphabet quilt.

I have lots of boyish fabric, so I’ve chosen to use that, with an alternating background of red and blue to make my quilt, rather than the rainbow theme that I know lots of other people are following. Some blocks are going to have larger patches of letter than others, so I just need to arrange them as we go so the fabric with the larger prints fall on these letters.

This month we made the letters A-E.

 

A: B: C: D: E:

Altogether these five will make up the first row 🙂

You can see the letters that other people have made over on Blossom Heart Quilts. And since it’s August tomorrow, I guess it won’t be very long before I’ll be starting on F-J!

Modern QAL – July Block

This month’s block for the Mondern Blocks Quilt A Long looked a bit more difficult than the last one, and I have put off doing it for a while. But with only a few days left of the month I couldn’t leave it much longer!

I needn’t have worried. It looks harder with the diagonal lines, but in fact it was very simple, and now it’s finished it looks very pretty.

All of the blocks are taken from this book:

This month’s block is called Megan’s Star and the tutorial for it can be found on the blog Samelia’s Mum. You can see all the other blocks people have made and linked up over on And Sew We Craft.

Here is my block 🙂

 

 

This post contains affiliate links.

Modern QAL – June Block

 

I was a bit late joining the Modern Blocks QAL, so that it was already the end on May before I started my first block and the second block was being released. This meant that I completed a block two nights running!

This month’s block is called Spool because it’s meant to look like a cotton reel/spool. The tutorial was posted over on The Crafty Mummy.

It was soo much easier than the May block. I enjoyed making it because I had a much better idea of what I was doing and knew it would turn out OK. It consisted of making 5 rows and then sewing all the rows together – all straight lines and no diagonals!

I’m using these spotty fabrics with a white background so I decided to choose some different colours of it this month and went with grey for the main block and yellow for the two ends.

It turned out quite well. Here is my finished block:

You can see all the other blocks that people have created over on the Modern QAL Block 2 Linky Party.

I wonder what my July block will look like?!

Modern QAL – May Block

 

I can’t resist a sew-along, and especially not one that has competitions and prizes along the way, so I’ve signed up to do the Modern Blocks Quilt- Along (QAL) over on And Sew We Craft!

The plan is to make one block a month to put together to make a quilt, so by this time next year we’ll have 12 blocks. The blocks are all taken from this book:

There’s a tutorial for the block each month but we were also recommended to get ourselves a copy of the book. Being somewhat impulsive and impatient I wanted it NOW and didn’t want to wait a few weeks for it to arrive from overseas so I opted to get the kindle version! (If you click the book above you can actually see several of the blocks using the ‘Click to look inside’ feature if you fancy checking some of the blocks out) It is also available as a kindle version from the amazon.co.uk site.

This month’s block is called Follow the Leader. The tutorial is here. It’s a very pretty looking block, but when I first looked at it my initial reaction was ‘it looks a bit hard!’

In reality though, taking it one step at a time, it was perfectly do-able. You make lots of rectangly triangle pieces called geese and then position them so it looks like they’re flying in a circle following one another.

I’ve decided to use some multicoloured spotty material that I have as a jelly roll and FQ pack to make my blocks with white as the background. This month I’m using the red, blue, green and purple to make my geese.

Here is my finished block:

You can see all the other blocks that people have made by visiting the Block One Linky Party page.

 

(Disclaimer: this post contains affiliate links as part of the amazon.com and amazon.co.uk associates programs)

Quilted Mat Sew-Along

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This week I took part in the quilted mat sew-along hosted by Sew Delicious. The mat was split into three tutorials, with one posted Monday, one on Wednesday and one on Friday. I really liked having it split into the three parts as it meant I could actually keep up and by the end of Friday my mat was finished.

I decided I was going to use all materials that were already in my cupboard to make this project which made it a good stashbuster. I chose to go spotty and used this selection of polka dot fat quarters that I bought some time last year. I’ve used bits of them for other projects but since the squares were only 5 inches each and I used just 2 of each colour, I didn’t need too much of each one.I was really pleased with my mat after the first tutorial, when all the top was sewn as my lines were nice and straight 🙂 I’d spent a long time measuring and matching corners, so was happy that my hard work had paid off. The second step was the quilting which was nice and easy using my walking foot. It’s the first time I’ve quilted anything!Finally came the binding. I made my own, using of course another colour of polka dot fabric – purple! I’ve also never binded anything before, and this was the bit I was most nervous about. I joined my strips (because even though the mat is small, as I was using FQs I had several strips to join) on the diagonal, and found examples online of fastening the beginning and end together the same way, making it hard to tell now it’s finished where it was I began. The back of my mat is navy polka dots. If I look at the back for too long it makes my eyes go funny like one of those optical illusions!It’s just the right size for sitting under my sewing machine. I love it because it’s bright and cheerful, and I’m so pleased with how it turned out.

I even asked my little monster what he thought of Mummy’s spotty mat.

His response: “Wow!”

Good answer little man. Good answer.

Crafty Bums Quilt Along 2012 – Block 3

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I've just finished my third block for the Crafty Bums Quilt Along 🙂

This one is called a disappearing nine square block because it's made from 9 squares (which I didn't believe when I first looked at it either!) The tutorial for making it is on the Crafty Bums blog here.

I think I probably need to work a bit on my measuring skills for seams as not all the pieces line up exactly, but hopefully that will come in time.

I've been much quicker making this one from the time it was released than the last ones. The downside to this is that I've now got a longer wait until the next one, but excitingly I think now I have 3 squares that that's a quarter of my quilt done!!

Crafty Bums Quilt Along 2012 – Block 2

Yippee, I've finished my second quilt block!

This is block 2 of the Crafty Bums Quilt Along.

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It's pretty, isn't it. I've impressed even myself with how it's turned out. I had fears it wasn't going to end up the right size after doing the first few pieces as they stopped matching up in length, but after a bit of fiddling I got it back to square by the last piece 🙂

So I now have two quilt blocks!

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And I'm looking forward to doing the third – but they're not letting on what that one will be just yet!