Finished Project: Flowery Wall-hanging

Wall-Hanging a photo by clumsy chord on Flickr.

I have the most insipid names for the things I make. Well, I suppose that's because I just don't name anything, so I always default to basic description. This is a wall-hanging with flowers on it and too many flowery prints, so flowery wall-hanging. A baby quilt that's pink? Pink baby quilt. I don't like to label my quilts, and don't, so I can't see any sense in giving names to them either. I tend to think of my projects by certain names - the origami quilt, the brown quilt-along, the reflection one - but I don't think they're art that'll someday be catalogued, you know? If, 200 years from now, some quilt historian finds the slightly tattered remains of this wall-hanging... I don't mind if it's called WH200129-94 with no name, creator, or date attached to it.

Anyway, yes. A wall-hanging that is flowery. I made this in the fall/winter of 2010, for my mom, but didn't actually get it finished until early in January. (My photo is dated January 6.) I bought it as a kit (for a table-runner, which I made square rather than long) because the colours seemed like they might match my mom's upstairs. I don't know if it matches as I've not been back home since I sent it off to her, but it seemed like it might work. There's a lot that I don't really like about this project - the fabrics, the colours, the style, etc. It's certainly not to my tastes, but when it comes to gifts, it's best not to please yourself, anyway, right?

Anyway, it's hard to tell in the photo, but there are buttons on the center of each flower, to help tie in the black thread I used to stitch down the appliquéd flowers. I quilted it using a kind of beige coloured thread, mainly straight line quilting around the outsides of things (kind of rounded-ish around the flowers) and then echoing the shape of the blocks.

This was the first project I ever made where I did the binding entirely myself. Normally I pass my quilts off to my mom for the binding, but it was for her, so it was time I learned to do it myself, and I was pretty happy with how it turned out. I've come to enjoy the binding process. Not so much stitching it on to begin with, but hand-stitching it down around the back. It's satisfying to do.

Finished Project: Pink Quilt-along Quilt

Pink Cherry House Quilt-along quilt
Originally uploaded by clumsy chord.

This is the very moment that the pin on the right let go and the quilt nearly went flying across my muddy, nasty backyard while I had a (video) camera hung around my wrist and the regular camera around my neck and a pair heels for shoes that were aerating the grass. Fortunately only three of six or seven pins let go, so the quilt stayed hanging awkwardly on the fence while I mentally debated the benefits of recording the moment versus trying to stop it from happening. (And in light of the shoes, I probably couldn't have made it over there fast enough to catch the quilt if it had gone airborne anyway.)

I'm going to have to try another day to get a full-on shot of the quilt, because I don't like any of the against the fence ones very much.


Of course, I do have other shots I can use anyway. It's not that they're horrible (though I'm no photographer), but the lighting isn't quite right and I really, really should have pressed the quilt before trying to photograph it. I had, originally, pinned the quilt to the fence down the right hand-side so that it wouldn't get caught by the wind, but that mainly worked to show off how badly it needed pressing.

Outgoing: Fabric Postcards

I don't know why, but I forgot in my previous entry about swapping fabric postcards to include the name/location of the swap group. It can be found here on Livejournal. I've just opened up a poll there today to see when people would like to swap again, which I'm hoping will end up at the end of May (though I know one person at least is ready to do a swap pretty much immediately). The way I prefer to run the swap is a No Stress Swap, which means that everyone knows the end date in advance, makes what they want to make, and then signs up AFTER they've completed everything. Swap partners are arranged once sign-ups are over and that way no one gets flaked on.

Anyway, these are the postcards I mailed off in this past round.

Pennants postcard a photo by hold your spin on Flickr.

This was really my favourite postcard that I made. It started out with an idea one day when a co-worker was talking about looking for Buddhist prayer flags, and that got me google image searching photos of prayer flags. What I loved about the photos was the pop of colours against the bright blue sky, so I recreated that with pennants (since I don't know enough about Buddhism to be comfortable making representations of prayer flags). It's definitely a look that's been done in a lot of ways - when I searched flickr, I found pillows and mini-quilts galore - but it's just so beautiful. I frayed the edges of the pennants in hopes of making them look old and weather-beaten.

Elephants postcard a photo by clumsy chord on Flickr.

My next card was this elephant card, featuring snippets of Tip Top elephants fabric. I had this idea in mind based on the video for the Metric song Stadium Love, which features animals going head to head in combat. There was a long time between my seeing the video and making the card, so actually they haven't really got anything to do with one another in terms of appearance, but it's pretty cute anyway.

Finished Project: Playday Posh Tot quilt

This finished project goes allllll the way back to January 25, 2011. It was my second finished project for 2011. I want to keep a record of everything I work on/complete this year, hence this post (and a future one on a wall-hanging I made for my mom).



This is a gift for my boss's new baby, Ronan Quentin, who was born (early! hence the late quilt) on January 13, 2011.

The pattern is called Posh Tot and can be bought from Blue Underground Studios. It's about 36" x 48" and I made it using Kona cottons in Windsor, Chartreuse, and Brown, and a Robert Kaufman print from the Playday line. I didn't pick out any of these fantastic colours myself, I actually bought a kit from one of my favourite online fabric shops, Mad About Patchwork. (I also bought the Posh Tot pattern through her site, but the last time I checked I don't think she had it avaiable. Or maybe it was just the kit that's no longer available. Hm.)

Finished Project: Pink and Brown Baby Quilt

Pink and Brown Baby Quilt a photo by hold your spin on Flickr.

I'm calling this a finished project, even though it's just a quilt top and hasn't been quilted/bound, because I'm sending it off to be donated to the Linus Connection in Texas. So, you know, finished, but not finished.

This is a project that I started in the fall on 2006 when a block of the month group started up on Livejournal (Block of the Month). I was trying to do the BoM in two different versions - this one using a line of fabrics called In the Pink (plus two extra fabrics - the blue and the green are from a different line) and a second one using a purple batik with black and white prints (eventually I added a nearly solid pink and solid white to some blocks). I didn't finish either of them.

I've been having an on-going freak out about having too many unfinished projects (many of which I am totally disinterested by, these days) so I pulled out a stack of shoe boxes, each of which have a different project in the, and chose these two BoMs to send away.

For this quilt top, I only had six blocks made, and it felt sort of lop-sided because I had three blocks with the green in it, two with no additional colour, and just one with blue. I decided to make two more blocks with blue so that I could try to balance it out a little.

There are a lot of things I would change, if I were to start back from the beginning, mainly to keep the same background colour on each of the blocks (two of them look like they're floating on the background and the rest don't) and to use more of the dark brown and less of the warm beige colour. But it's done, and done is good.

The eight blocks on point with a 3.5-inch border is about 41-in x 58-in if I'm doing my mental math correctly. In any case, it's not terribly big, but it should do for a little girl somewhere.

I didn't take any pictures of the 16 blocks I sent off in the purple group. I have pictures of them, but not as a collection. I should maybe have made tops with them too, but I wasn't sure if it would be better to make 2 smaller quilts with 8 blocks each or one larger quilt with all 16 blocks. This way the volunteers at Linus Connection can decide for themselves.