Jen's Quilts

  A while back grandma gave me some blocks that Aunt Blanche had put together at some point.  I had no idea what to do with them.  There wasn't enough to make a quilt from, so I thought about a table runner.  That didn't seem to work either so there they sat for a very long time. I pulled them out again earlier this year, probably after watching too many Youtube quilt videos, and decided to use the free version of PreQuilt to help me figure out what to do with the blocks.  After some messing around I came up with a layout that made a small lap size quilt.  The layout used the nine similar blocks and a lot of negative space.  And I had just the right Liberty fabric I'd picked up from the usual place when they were having a sale.  With so few pieces, this was the quickest and lightest quilt I had put together in a while.  So I took the opportunity to piece it on the antique Singer. There were three other blocks in the collection, but they were...

I watch a fair few quilting videos on YouTube.  A couple of years ago I found Carol Thelen, who was releasing a video a day of a different block .  I very much enjoyed these videos, and seeing all the different blocks she was making, and providing free patterns for.  For some blocks, Carol showed what they would look like as a whole quilt.  And when I saw the delectable mountains block and quilt , I knew that was the pattern to use for a layer cake I had laying around. The Benartex layer cake had been sitting in the stash for a few years, maybe since one of mum's trips to the US?  I didn't want a plain background (though it does sort of look like it in the photos), so I ended up purchasing three different low volume fabrics in white from the usual big shop. After one of my last quilts which had a few hundred small half square triangles, it was quite nice to work with a much larger half triangle size.  These were then trimmed, cut into rectangles and rearr...

  As mentioned at the end of my log cabin post a few months back, I quite enjoyed doing a less complicated quilt for a change, i.e. one with nothing but squares and rectangles.  And I was quite keen to use up a half layer cake of paisley fabric squares that I think I received after one of mum or grandma's trips to the US at some point. Given I only had 20 10-inch squares, (of 10 different fabrics), it took a long time to figure out what quilt pattern I was going to make with them.  For a while I thought I had settled on a smaller version of a jacobs ladder or similar, until I redid the maths and realised the amount of fabric I had was not going to work out.  Eventually, and around the time I was doing the log cabin, I found the Log CATin pattern by AGF Studio .  It was basically a half log cabin block, but cleverly cut the same way from both a print and a plain 10-inch square, so that you ended up with two blocks that were the inverse of each other.  But ...

  I've had a charm pack from Laundry Basket Quilts lying around for a while that I wasn't 100% sure what to do with.  I was interested in the Oh My Stars pattern by Pat Sloan, but that took two charm packs.  So when she showed a version that took one pack, I figured that was what I would do. Looking through my fabric stash, I found some coordinating fabric I had for a while, and some other fabric I'd picked up at a destash last year. So I got to it, arranging the charm squares on the floor near the sewing machine in an order I liked, and sewing them back together as soon as I could before the cat rearranged them. The centre of the top was together pretty quickly, but then I packed it away for a bit while I worked on something else. I pulled it out again later to put on the borders, but then packed it up again. When it was finally time to think about quilting, I decided to get a bit experimental. I'd seen a YouTube video about glue basting a quilt instead of pinning and ...

  I found myself wanting to make a quilt for a particular reason, and it didn't take long to decide that I wanted to make a log cabin quilt out of a brown batik jelly roll I had.  I had thought I was going to use the jelly roll to make the New Year's Star , but this seemed like a better use for it.  I had a look at a couple of patterns for making log cabin blocks out of jelly rolls, particularly this one by Carol Thelen which made 10" finished blocks, but ultimately I decided I liked Donna Jordan's version better, which made 14" finished blocks.  This quilt used the majority of a jelly roll, and while I didn't mind the size, I wanted to do it a bit differently.  Instead of the 3 x 4 block setting with borders, wanted to do a 4 x 5 block setting with no borders.    This would give me a slightly smaller quilt which was fine by me.  But it would also require more fabric than was available in one jelly roll.  It was time to do some maths. I fig...

I found myself in possession of a few layer cakes at some point, and had no idea what to do with them until I saw this ocean waves pattern using 10 inch squares.  I knew straight away that I wanted to use a red and beige layer cake to make the pattern, and soon found a plain cream background to use with it.   That was a long time ago.  A couple of years maybe?  Other than the other quilts I was working on at the time, the major hurdle I had in getting this particular quilt started was the thought of the eight at a time half square triangles that would be required.  Usually I don't mind half square triangles.  But the thought of sewing 40 x eight at a time half square triangles, and then ironing and trimming to size the resulting 320 block parts, was definitely something I wasn't looking forward to.   I divided the layer cake into dark reds, medium/light reds, medium beiges and pale red/beiges to get the particular colour effect I was after....