Jen's Quilts

  At the beginning of 2025 I decided I wanted to make the Jagged X's pattern that I had seen Donna Jordan make ages ago.  I had a batik jelly roll I think I got for my birthday one year and thought the colours would be really nice in a quilt like this. After finding a nice grey on white batik for the background, I cut out all the required pieces and then spent a long time drawing the diagonal sewing line on the back of the background fabric.  Once this was eventually finished, I sewed and ironed and trimmed all the rectangular pieces, before turning pairs into the square sub-unit, and joining four sub-units to make the larger square "X".  I don't remember how long it took to do this all, but it was probably a few months in between work and everything.  However, once I had the centre together, and some very long strips of squares for the borders, it all got packed up and put to the side.  I had already decided to do the borders in red, but it took me foreve...

 After a somewhat busy winter, I finally got around to finishing another quilt.  Not like I haven't done any quilting - in fact I was working on a completely different quilt before this one, but parked it while I decided what colour border I wanted. The Layer Cake Spools pattern appealed to me as I had a layer cake sitting around that needed a purpose, and this seemed like a match.  To maximise use of the layer cake, I adjusted the pattern somewhat to use 40 of the 10" squares, and have a 4 x 5 'spool' layout.  I also didn't follow the instructions exactly, working with the larger first round of pieced blocks without trimming to size, so that I could end up with a slightly larger final block, and also avoid the non-standard block size.  I paired the layer cake with a Devonstone solid in the colour 'Seeded'.  To be able to cut out 40 matching 10" squares, I knew I needed just over 2.5m of the background.  But that is an odd size to purchase, so I only ...

I'd had a pack of 12 coordinating fat quarters (picked up on sale at the usual big place) sitting in the stash for a while.  I had no idea what to do with them until I saw a pattern in the Quilters Companion magazine (forget which issue now).  It used 12 yellow and black fat quarters arranged in plus  shapes.   Wanting an easy-ish project, I went ahead and cut up the fat quarters into squares, and then started arranging on the floor in the dining room.  I decided to put the quilt top together on the antique Singer, and I could set the machine up there for the duration.  I started by following the design of the original pattern, which used partial plus  blocks to fill in the gaps between complete blocks.  But that left me with plenty unused pieces.  So I decided change up the pattern and use as many full plus  blocks as I had available fabric.  The gaps around the edge would then need to be filled in with something else. An...

  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 ...