A Finish - Modern Irish Quilters Swap

Today is the postal date for our Modern Quilters Ireland swap!  This year, we have been making Christmas cushions, for our assigned partner.  It's a secret swap and my partner doesn't know I am making for her but I hope she'll like this as much as I do.

I had great fun with this little project!  I was going to hand quilt it but then changed my mind.  I wanted swirly quilting in the white to suggest a bit of a snow storm and once I had that on, the hand quilting didn't feel right.  I put a bit in the blue star points but you can barely see it!

I also changed my mind on the backing fabric.

I was going to use the Folk Art Holiday fabric but then thought it would be better used to bind the cushion and frame the star, so I dug into my Ikea 2014 Christmas print.  I have a few yards of this home decoration weight cotton to make into a table cloth.  I really like it as the backing!

The Folk Art fabric worked really well then for binding front and back.  I used two 2.5" strips x width of fabric and a 3/8" seam to have it even both sides of the cushion.  Clover wonder clips held everything in place (love them!!!) and then zig-zagged it all down!

The star burst was quilted in straight lines using a walking foot and the star and ray were quilted in the ditch too to make them stand up a bit from the background.

Lastly, to accompany the cushion, we were to make a small Christmas tree decoration.  Mine was made of scraps from Joy by Kate Spain as was the red in the cushion above.

So all done and another tick off the Christmas list - getting there!  Just have to put up our tree today now so I can hang my decoration from last years swap!  Love this little touch and hope it will be a yearly tradition!

Mum saw this finished yesterday and given her track record of swiping cushions,  I had to tell her hands off it's spoken for!  So this is going in the post today - hope you like it partner!

Linking up to Crazy Mom Quilts and

Night Sky Update

Well, all the Flying Geese are made at last and up on the wall!  The blocks are still not yet pieced but I think Jana might be extending the Quilt-A-Long, so I might get this top together before the 25th.  There are a lot of Flying Geese in this pattern.  My small verison has over 90 and the full version of the quilt over 170 of them!

Camille Roskelly uses the stitch and flip method in this pattern.  You cut 2 squares for every one rectangle and place one of the squares right sides together on the rectangle, sew a line along the diagonal corner to corner and trim the excess 1/4" away from your sewn line.  Do the same again with the other square on the remaining side.  This means a lot of scraps! 

There are other ways to make Flying Geese, specialty rulers like Fons and Porters, paper piecing or the make 4 at a time from a larger square.  During the angled on line class with Rachel @ Stitched in Colour the pros and cons of each method was looked at and the Fons and Porter ruler got the thumbs up and the 4 at a time method, the thumbs down (harder to keep 1/4" at the centre seam and 3 usually turn out ok and 1 a little off!).

I made mine using the stitch and flip method and still got 3 good ones to 1 wonky one when I chain pieced them.  Next time, I will slow down and pay more attention!  Still now that everything is up on the wall, I know what Christmas fabric I have left in my stash for other projects (mum wants a table runner!)

As for the scraps, they are the perfect size for my Cushion and small decoration for the Modern Quilters Ireland swap.  I made a tiny 3" star from the leftover triangles of a small star and used the Red, White and Aqua triangles below from 2 of the larger stars. 

Adding some layer cake squares and some Kona Snow for background fabric, I have a shining star!  Hope my swap partner likes it!

Now just to quilt it! 

Happy weekend everybody! 

Modern Quilters Ireland sewing day

Last Saturday, some of the Modern Quilters of Ireland met in Galway for a sewing day. Cindy had arranged for us to use one of the rooms in the University and had set up tables for swapping books, fabric, treats and baked goods.   There was also a table to donate blue and green 12.5" blocks for Bee Blessed (a group who make donation quilts that our group supports).

Louise & Claire

Erin working hard trimming a bazillion half square triangles!

Louise and Cindy

Claire doing something Christmassy with a pattern from Quilt Now magazine.

We brought our machines, extensions leads and projects to work on for the day.

While everybody looks really busy I can't say I was the most industrious, rather spending the morning nibbling on home baked chocolate yummies, browsing through books, chatting and cutting fabric for 2 blocks for Bee Blessed.  Wilbur (project previous post) didn't get anywhere near the machine, and I brought my triangle quilt to finish too - I was aiming a bit too high I think!

We had the opportunity to browse through some fabric and accessories from Fluffy Sheep Quilting, PippaBlue and Wrap it, and I did pick up a few fat quarters and some Handmade with Love wooden buttons.

Anneliese being really productive despite popping in and out to pick up the kids.  She brought along Patrick the owl pincushion I made for her in last years swap.  Quite a few of us had our swap pincushions with us!

Patrick!

My hard work for the day!

Goodies!

And they came wrapped up in this!

More Goodies!

Thanks to our goodie bag suppliers for being so generous and thanks so much to Cindy, Anna and all who helped make the day happen!

Medallion Quilt Along

The Modern Irish Quilters are having a Quilt-A-Long.  It is for a Medallion quilt and there are two choices.  Follow along building borders around a central panel of 15", like a star or a paper pieced centre, or do your own thing, following guidelines from Catbird Quilt Studio's series on how to make a Medallion Quilt.

I have ideas for both and I'm really intrigued by the design hints on both streams. The centre panel should be 1/4 to 1/3 the size of the quilt and there are hints for framing the surrounds and adding borders.  I am hoping to learn a lot!  The idea that is buzzing around my head the most is this one for a baby quilt with a centre panel made using hexagons; Something like this:

It came from playing with hexagon shapes in Microsoft Word and I ended up with a brightly coloured balloon. 
The sun and the grass came from the Craftsy 2012 BOM with Amy Gibson.  Her Block "Sunny with a chance of Hex" was used to teach Paper piecing Hexagons and she challenged us to make our own version and that's were the bees and flowers came from.   The ideas from these blocks stayed with me so adding the balloon seemed like a good idea and to add a curve to the grass and then to fill the space with a kite and some clouds maybe.

Playing with borders is giving me this so far, though it will probably change as I make it.

 

I want my centre panel to be rectangular not square and to fit all of the hexagon designs I'm going to make it 18" by 24".  To make the balloon and flowers etc I've had to learn a little about the geometry of Hexagons.  If you have no interest in Maths you can skip this bit!

You can print templates for Hexies from Incompetech and they look like this:

You enter the length of the side you want and it calculates the rest and gives you the template to cut the hexies to the correct size.

For the balloon above I wanted it to be about 5" high and there are 5 hexies stacked to make the balloon at it's highest point, so I need my individual hexies to be 1" high.

The height is the square root of 3 multiplied by s.  The square root of 3 is 1.732 (1.732 x1.732=3) so if I want a 1" height I need to divide 1 by 1.732 to get s which is 0.58".  Putting 0.58 into the website gives me this template.

I have a 5" high balloon and it will be  just under 6" across.  (W=2x0.58 which is 1.16 and there are 5 hexies so 5 x 1.16 is 5.8")

So I now have 5 templates printed for the 5 different sizes I need (balloon, flower, bee, sun, clouds).  I'll worry about the kite next week!

So for the rest of the week, I'll be busy cutting up the templates and stitching tiny hexagons together!

And for the original idea of a star centrepiece in case you are interested this is the Mosaic of favourites I found on flickr.  I am hoping for some border inspiration from these gorgeous quilts.

1. Swirling Medallion quilt top - side view, 2. Marcelle Medallion - advice please, I'm stuck, 3. Border 8, 4. Modern Medallion Top, 5. FO: Marcelle Medallion, 6. Mystery Medallion Quilt - Border 3, 7. Baisakhi Medallion Quilt, 8. Medallion Quilt detail, 9. Medallion Quilt detail, 10. Medallion Quilts on Craftsy, 11. Medallion Border #6, 12. My Quilt  

Linking up to Modern Quilt Guild of Ireland and