Knitting & Stitching Dublin 2014

Last Sunday, a group of us went to the Knitting & Stitching show in Dublin.  We left Limerick at 8 in the morning and arrived home just about 8 in the evening!

It was a long day but a productive one.  There was a whole bolt of wadding & a new machine brought home in the car with us!  And I got to see my Bachelors Walk quilt hanging for the Irish Patchwork Society Explorations exhibit!

I also bought a few bits and bobs myself.  I did have a list of stuff to buy but managed to leave it in the car! 

I did well though, remembering most items.

This is my haul!

The quilting frame, chalk pencil and perle cottons are for my hand quilting projects that I have yet to start (Penny Sampler and Sashiko Quilt).  The quilt ruler stand and the hair clip (yes I bought a hair clip at a quilting show!) were bought on whim.  Everything else has a purpose in mind!

The most important thing though was a replacement 1/4" foot.  I broke mine making a bag.  I had moved the needle all the way over to sew a zip, changed foot and forgot to move the needle back.  Broken needle, broken foot and all my own fault!

Some of the quilts on display for explorations from our Just Threads sewing group were Suzanne's X-plorations, Meg's sampler quilt she didn't like much, chopped up and put back together, Paula's fabric dyeing exploration (I always see Godzilla in this one!) and Isabelle's school project which is probably the cutest in the whole show.  Her class hand dyed the fabric, then her mum printed their photos onto fabric and Isabelle quilted it herself on her mum's machine!

I really liked this group project from Cork group 4WTG but my favourite quilt of the whole exhibition is this one of the Hubble space telescope and the planets by Ethelda Ellis.

 This nebula even made it onto the exhibition cover - isn't it fantastic?

There was also a mini- do not touch the quilts competition and this Sin Bonnet Sue mini was the winner.  Made me smile anyway!

So that was the weekend shopping adventure - now really looking forward to putting some of the haul to good use!

WIP - Night Sky QAL & Christmas projects

Have you seen Camille Roskelly's new star pattern Night Sky?

To me it looks really Christmassy, must be the time of year or the Christmas to do list but this starry quilt is calling to me!

Jana @ Jana Machado is having a quilt-a-long using this pattern which is available to buy on sale at Fat Quarter shop here as pattern of the month!

I met Jana this year on the Let's Get Acquainted blog hop run by Plum and June.  It was a fantastic blog hop and there have been so many connections made and even quilt bees started from it that when Jana asked me if I wanted to quilt along with her I jumped right in.

Jana has organised prizes  for the Quilt-A-Long and has even given away a copy of this pattern last week.  We are one week into it and Jana is sharing her first row of blocks already!  I'm only at the fabric pull stage!

The pattern quilt finishes at 64" x 80" and uses 28 fat quarters plus background fabric.  I'm planning on making mine a little smaller by eliminating the last column and the last 2 rows and finishing closer to 50" for a baby present.

I'm going scrappy because I don't have the 20 or so fat quarters in Christmas fabrics I will need so I'm using what's left of a layer cake of Joy by Kate Spain (you'd be surprised how much you can get from a layer cake) and some new fabric from Fluffy Sheep Quilting called Folk Art Holiday.  What do you think?  Want to join the fun?  The details are on Jana's blog here!

I still need to make a Christmas cushion for my Modern Irish Quilters swap.  Partners were assigned yesterday and having read my partners likes, I know exactly what I want to make!  Before there was Love Patchwork and Quilting magazine, there was Love Quilting and Patchwork.  It came out twice to see how the market would take to it and we loved it.  In Autumn 2013 edition Katy Jones @ I'm A Ginger Monkey had a paper piecing pattern using hexagons,rectangles and triangles.  I'm hoping to make a Christmas version with red blue and green on a white frosty background.

The branch I'm in of the Irish Patchwork Society are having a Christmas Stocking challenge and I'm hoping to make one with an embroidered version of this Rudolph card pattern I found in one of mum's old craft magazines Crafts Beautiful from November 2013.

So that's the plan!  We'll see how far this little bit of fabric will stretch with some Kona Snow and Navy thrown in!  I have a feeling there will be a trip to the quilt shop needed too!

Linking up to

October Bee Blocks - Book Shelves!

 I didn't do much Halloween sewing this year.  Last year was Halloween mad.  I finished my Halloween quilt I'd been working on for 2 years and made a banner, place mats and a trick or treat bag for the Halloween swap.  This year, while keeping an eye on the door for the kids (our doorbell is broken!) I took out my leftovers from last year and some new Stitchy witch fabric I had bought to make some Bee blocks. 

It felt right to be working with spooky pumpkins and the last of my dancing skeletons on Halloween night!  For our Modern Irish Bee, Tomomi of Slaney Handcraft asked for bookshelf blocks that represented a book genre or theme using the fabrics.  I've seen travel and animals so I decided to do Horror and Photography!

My first fabric pull was way to wide, blocks were meant to be 12.5 to 13.5 and I was up at about 20"  Tomomi doesn't like prints that are too childish so I played around a bit and left in the spooky tree, pumpkin faces, stitchy granny and a witches hat (reminds me of Harry Potter!)  I used orange and green to co-ordinate to bring up to 13.5" wide x 12.5" tall.  Hope this is ok and not too much!

For my second shelf, I made a photography section!  I've been collecting camera fabrics and some I'd ordered off Etsy from links Yvonne sent me had arrived.  Claire had given me a fat quarter too so I cut the 4.5" strips I needed for my quilt project and then used some of the fabric to make 1.5 to 2.5" strips for the books.  I did re-use 2 fabrics twice but you often get volume 1 and volume 2 in photo books so that's ok in my mind anyway!

I really love how this last one turned out.  Tomomi's guide to making these blocks is here on the Modern Quilters Ireland blog.  Putting these in the post today!

We have a winner!

To celebrate 225th post on this blog (I didn't notice I had gone past 200 for a week or two - doh!) we had a giveaway post last week and the winner is Joy who left comment number 11!

Congratulations Joy, I've gifted your choice, Designing Modern Quilts with Weeks Ringle, through Craftsy.  You should have an email in your inbox - hope you enjoy the class as much as I did!

Thanks to all entered and thanks for your lovely comments!

WIP Wednesday - Christmas swaps!

I know it's Halloween week and I shouldn't really be mentioning Christmas sewing until at least Saturday, when the chocolate is eaten and the barm brack has been toasted! So I'm breaking my own rules here with an update on Christmas swaps as the deadlines were last Friday and this Friday!



1. Christmas Ornament Pillow, 2. Winter pillow for Julianna (1), 3. CIMG9075, 4. Pillow-cover, 5. ChevronPillows - QuiltDetail, 6. Rear of my christmas pillow, 7. Aqua and pink christmas pillow, 8. Christmas Gifts, 9. Christmas FussySquares sewn together, 10. Christmas Snowflake ...a better photo and a little QAL, 11. Christmas pillow front, 12. paper pieced Christmas pillow, 13. Savvy Seasons pillow cover, 14. patchwork pillow cover, 15. pillow cover - christmas, 16. Christmas pillow

The Modern Quilters Ireland group are having another Christmas swap. Last year it was a table runner and this year we are swapping cushions! This is my mosaic of favourite picks from Flickr, to help my swap partner figure out what I'd like in a swap item. It seems that this year, I am drawn to Christmas decorations and can't go wrong stars and Christmas trees! Last year, I was all about the penguins and polar bears and to be fair I still love those guys (especially the penguins!)

Sign ups are open until this Friday and anyone resident in Ireland and a member of Modern Quilters Ireland can participate. Membership is free, if you want to join us in our Christmas swap! I've written a tutorial on how to make an envelope backed cushion for the swap here.



A second swap I joined in was Round 11 of the Fussy Cut Square in a square swap. This one was themed a Holiday swap. Amanda @ What the Bobbin organises swaps based on a 4" paper pieced economy block throughout the year with different themes for each round. This is my second Christmas round so last year I received 12 blocks and this year I made 12 more to swap.



The idea is to use a fussy cut centre and add coordinating fabrics for the outer rounds. You make and send 12 and you get 12 different ones back. It's a lovely way to be social and it gives you variety in your project that you might not normally have making all the squares yourself. I used fabrics from Riley Blake's Santa's Little Helpers, Joy by Kate Spain and Nancy Halvorsen's Holiday Favourites. Hope my swap partners like them!

I made a spring, summer autumn, winter cushion with 12 squares I received last year in a non-themed swap (added 4 more of my own to make 16!) This year I have a plan for a Christmas I spy type baby quilt with my 24. We'll see how I get on with that!



If you fancy making some of your own Amanda has the template available for download here.

Linking up to

Design Wall Monday

Trying hard to clear the to do's to make way for Christmas sewing, I managed to get this scrappy quilt top together from my leftovers of this applique one on the right.

Yes, I know Halloween isn't over yet and I normally try not to mention Christmas until 1st November but it's a bit of a list this year and I could use one or two of Santa's Elves helping out!

The 4.5" squares have been up on the wall for a few weeks with no change so this weekend I got to stitching them up.

On their own they were a little bit small so I added a border.  I tried a 4.5" border at first but it didn't work so an 8.5" border is what I went with in the end and now I'm thinking of hand stitching that too!  Fair warning though, apart from embroidery I'm not the most patient person for hand sewing!  The plan is to Sashiko stitch a different pattern in each of the blank squares.

I think I might be more excited by the scrappy leftover one than the Fat Quarter Fizz version above!

I've been choosing the Sashiko stitch patterns I want to use for the larger blank squares from a book Claire lent me a few weeks ago.

It's going to be hard to switch gears from Sashiko to Christmas sewing so I hope to get this basted up today and hopefully buy some orange, yellow and red thread at the Knitting & Stitching show in Dublin next weekend.  The plan is to do a bit here and there over the next few months.   I have to buy perle cotton for my Penny Sampler too so the shopping list is growing!

Linking up to Design Wall Monday and

Finish it Friday - a pretty simple cushion!

Before Halloween next week and the Christmas sewing starts I thought I'd better get a few to do's off my list that have been hanging around a while.  So I have a small simple finish to share with you today.  

My friend Sarah wanted cushions to spruce up her new living room and earlier this year we made the Tula Pink Camper Van.  To go with this Sarah picked a dog applique pattern by Lynnette Anderson which reminded her of her old Labrador Holly.  I finally got around to finishing it off as a cushion for her last night!

I have a tutorial written to post next Monday on the Modern Irish Quilters blog for how to make an envelope backed cushion if you want to see how I made this one.

For quilting, I straight line quilted the white outer border all the way around and stitched in the ditch around the dog as Sarah didn't want too much fuss around Holly.  A tip I learned on Craftsy's Creative Quilting with your walking foot, is to mark a little distance away with some masking tape to give yourself a straight line to follow.  I found myself a little off from time to time and corrected it on the next line moving the masking tape up an inch or two as I went along.  This meant I didn't have to risk any markings still showing on the white fabric and was easy to see.

Sarah liked Holly as is without any embroidery but I couldn't resist adding a little wooden button.  I hope she likes it.  When the Modern Irish Quilters met in Galway last month I bought a selection of wooden buttons from Christina's shop Wrap it and couldn't resist adding the heart to this project.

So a simple finish but I really like it.  I hope she does too!

Don't forget I'm giving away a Craftsy class to celebrate over 200 posts on the blog.  Please see below to enter if you would like a chance to win either Designing Modern Quilts by Weeks Ringle or Amy Gibson's Twisted Irish Chain.

Linking up to Finish it Friday at Crazy Mom Quilts and