Jen's Quilts

I finished a fair few quilts late last year, and in the first half of this year.  But then stuff happened.  Some of which was moving house and involved packing up all the sewing gear for a number of weeks.  The new place has a nice sewing space, and while it is not fully set up, I have finally been able to get back to quilting. Before the whole move thing, I had started another blue and orange quilt, though nowhere as complicated and time consuming as the last one .  I had a half jelly roll of assorted orange prints, and decided to make the Kisses Quilt Pattern by SewCanShe .  Given all the orange / yellow strips were patterned and quite bright, I decided to go with a plain blue background. The strips were cut, and the blocks went together very easy (though those pinked edges on the orange pieces were a pain sometimes).  I spent a fair while laying out the blocks and rearranging in order to avoid having the same fabric in close proximity in different blocks.  The quilt top was pieced t

  I look back over the number of quilts I've finished over the past year or so, and it is a lot.  But I have actually not started many.  There is a jelly roll quilt I started and completed last year, and I am working on a simple blue and orange number, but that is about it.  The rest have been finishes, and this is one of them.  I started working on it when I saw a block of the month quilt series in the Quiltmaker magazine .  A series of blocks was published in the magazine over 12 months, and looking at month number 1, I was keen to get started.  That was 18 months ago. I really enjoyed making the different blocks as they were released every couple of months, and after 12 months was keen to see what the final layout was going to look like and how all the different sized blocks were going to fit together.  However, when final layout was released, I didn't really like it.  If you have a look at the pattern in the link above, you will see that the designer used a lot of white spa

Short one this time - but another finish for the year.  I got the pinwheel hexagon blocks from Grandma last year, and it didn't take long to figure out what sort of background fabric to add to them.  But they then sat there for a while until I figured out what to do with them.  The twenty blocks didn't quite make a quilt size I wanted, and I didn't want to have a huge border.  I'm not sure what made me think of it, but I decided to add a blank block into each row, and quilt it with the same pinwheel pattern as the other blocks. As a lot of ruler work was involved for the pinwheels, I quilted each of the rows separately, then joined them together with the strip in between.  The borders were added later, and then some simple echoing around the blocks with the walking foot. So that is two finishes for the year, and no starts.  I had to fix that last night by cutting pieces for a new quilt using a half jelly roll and background fabric, but I am also still keen to finish ano

The first finish of the year is actually the quilt that started this blog.  Yep, I finally got around to quilting it. Back in 2018 I thought I would take on a quilting challenge, so I signed up for  Aves , a Block of the Week quilt by Kathryn Kerr .  For 45 consecutive Sundays, I receive the instructions to complete one block for the quilt and do a bit of construction on the way. For the past five years the quilt top has been sitting in my spare wardrobe, along with a pieced backing and enough binding to go around.  But I have not quilted it because it was huge and heavy, and I had no idea what to quilt.  Until one night last year.  I couldn't sleep, so I was lying in bed thinking about quilts as usual and suddenly I had an idea.  Concentric circles. Next morning I pulled the top out, had a look and a think and figured it would work. Because the top was so heavy (given there are so many bits of small fabric), I decided to only put enough wadding between the top and backing to allow

  Earlier this year (or was it last year?) Grandma gave me a stack of pink hexagons that had been made by her sister.  Grandma had put some of the hexagons into a quilt, but there had been heaps, and these were left over. I wasn't 100% sure what I was going to do with them, but knew I wanted to highlight the 'tumbling block' aspect.  And being a very pink quilt, decided to pair it with grey.  I found a light grey for the background, and an Australiana style floral in pink and grey for a wide border. After deciding on the layout (which used all but one block), I started sewing the hexagons together in rows, with a heap of Y seams.  Once the whole centre part of the top was together, it sat there for a long while until I decided what to quilt - I was going to quilt the centre and add the borders later.  To bring out the tumbling block, I settled on 3 different designs for the blocks, and each block would have a different design on its 3 faces, with the density of the quilting

  Grandma and I both like many of the quilt patterns shown by Donna Jordan of Jordan Fabrics , and at the end of last year we decided we would each make the Lone Star quilt.  We both started in January, with grandma finishing a couple of months ago, while I finally finished the binding last night. The quilt is made from a jelly roll, by strip piecing and sub cutting into diamonds.  Sounded straightforward enough, but it turned out that figuring out the right amount of offset to get those 45 degree diamond shapes to line up when sewing them together was trickier than it looks.  I definitely ended up redoing some seams, and a couple more than once, trying to get the seams to line up.  Once the diamonds were together, the setting triangles were added for the background.  I really like the black background on this quilt, but sewing two pieces of black fabric together was required much more lighting than usual.   I decided to go off-pattern, and did a different border to what was outlined.