Destash Giveaway

One of the benefits of being at home full time on maternity leave is getting a bit of time to do jobs around the house that normally go on the long finger..like decluttering. My fabric stash is no exception and I have been trying to put some sort of order on it in the last week or so. I found I had a number of duplicate FQs and decided that to celebrate being "back" and to thank my lovely followers, I would give them away.

I have 2 giveaways. One is running over on my Facebook page for a bundle of 4 bright FQs. And I'm running a separate one here on the blog to win this lovely bundle of 7 FQs:

All from collections that I have loved.

First two from Hope Valley, middle three from Echo and the two on the right from 1001 Peeps.

*****GIVEAWAY NOW CLOSED*******

To be in with a chance to win, just leave a comment. Tell me what your all time favourite fabric line is!

For a second entry, follow me over on Instagram and leave a comment saying you do - I'm sewfairyface over there.

For a third entry, share this post on your FB/Twitter/Blog/Instagram etc and let me know you did.

Entries will close this Sunday at approx 6pm and I will choose a random winner then. If you do not have an email address attached to your Blogger profile I will not be able to contact you, so please leave your email address in the comments. If I can't contact the winnner, I will redraw. I will post worldwide. Don't forget to go enter the other giveaway on FB too.

Did I mention I love quilting books?

So today was a happy day, because not one, but two stunners arrived in the post.

 

I order Sarah Fielke's new book Handquilted with Love a couple of weeks ago and have been anxiously watching out the window early each morning since hoping the postman would arrive with it in hand. Today, finally, the van stopped outside my house and I opened the door before he could even knock. And I was not disappointed.

String Sane

The Made to Measure quilt on the cover  is what drew me to it - but there are even more beautiful treasures inside. I took some pics of a few of my favourites - just a few, I love pretty much every quilt in there.

Ups and Downs

This book is stunning. I love quilting books but sometimes I love just looking at them and end up feeling I wouldn't/couldn't actually make any of the patterns for myself. But this is not one of those books. There is just one gorgeous pattern after another all the way through. It's fab.

Lady Marmalade

 My biggest issue now is - which one am I going to make first?

Bangles

 

I really can't decide! I think I need a few more days poring over it to decide. Whatever one I pick, I have no doubt that any of these patterns would be perfectly suited to reducing the size of my overflowing scrap box. 2013 is going to be a stash busting year for me, I'm on a mission to clear out my mahooosive stash as much as I can! (Of which, more anon...)

The Bass Line

I also got a book which I have had on my wish list for a very, very long time. Free motion quilting is something that I can do in the most basic of fashions, but I'm tired of looking at fabulous quilting on other people's blogs and not being able to even attempt it. After finding a project that I made a complete mess of last year attempting to pebble quilt it, I decided to order it at the same time.

When the kids were in their music lesson today and I was sitting in the car for half an hour, I sat and started reading it. I am SO thrilled I got this book. It is inspiring and practical in equal measure and I can't wait to start trying some of the patterns.

Check back in tomorrow when I am doing a small giveaway to help my destash process and celebrate the fact that my "sewjo" is back! In fact, I'm doing 2 giveaways. The first is currently running over on my Facebook page for 4 bright and cheerful FQs so pop over there to enter that. And I more to give away here tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing you!

Finish A Long Quarter 2 plans

Now that I have rejoined the quilting and blogging universe, its time to get myself organised and finish the raft of projects I left littered in my wake last year. Luckily, Leanne's Finish-A-Long for Quarter 2 is coming along at just the right time so I'm linking up over there and hoping to have some nice completed projects to show you at the end of June.

So  here's my list! Even writing it is making feel excited to get started.

1. First up, my little boy's bright circles quilt. The quilt top was made last summer, but I ran into basting problems and did not have the energy to fix them with a big pregnant belly. Now rebasted and about a third of the way through quilting, this is my top priority project for the next few weeks.

2. A tumbler quilt using Kona solids and a pop of print for Cindy I'm ready to start this very soon, and looking forward to tackling another tumbler quilt as I loved the last one I made.

3. Baste, quilt and bind my Ruby quilt top.

4. Make another peasant dress for baby R in these lovely fabrics, seeing as the first one I made her fit her for all of 2 days!

5. I started (and had a complete craft fail with the quilting on) some placemats for my brother's new place last  year. I took them out and looked at them again this week to see if I can rescue them but one is beyond repair. So although this looks like a new project, really its a replacement finish that I need to do. I have a plan in my head (heavily inspired by Leanne's triangles mini quilt) to make some triangular placemats (using equilateral triangles) using these lovely mustard and grey fabrics, mostly from my Echo bundle:

6. I'm hesitant to add this to the list, but if things were to go very, very well, then I would just love to get my Mod Mosaic blocks from my friends in the Modern Irish Bee pieced into a quilt top and back, and the quilt finished. That's an ambitious one but I'll put it in here anyway, a bit of motivation is good for the soul!

So that's my list. Lots of good stuff on there and I really hope I can get them all done. I'm trying not to be too overambitious, but we'll see :-) Don't forget to head over to Leanne and see what everyone else is planning!

Baby boy quilt finish

As well as having my own gorgeous little new baby girl, I also have a new baby nephew, born just 7 weeks before my darling. So, obviously, he needed a quilt from his auntie Sarah. I picked out the fabrics after he was born  - already dreaming of bright and cheerful spring colours with boyish tones - but was unable to do too much with them.

Last week I pulled them out again and very quickly cut and pieced them.



I used Elizabeth Hartman's baby charm quilt pattern and its definitely one I'll be using again for last minute quilts, so simple and easy and because its about 33 x 40, very quick to baste, quilt and bind too. I decided to embroider his name in the bottom corner, using a simple running stitch in perle cotton. I traced his name using washable marker and it worked very well. I fused a small piece of very lightweight interfacing to the back of the fabric before starting to stablise the stitches a little.

After quilting it using a random stipple with some little hearts around his name, I picked a blue heart poplin print for the binding:



And a green hippo print from IKEA for the backing.

And in no time at all, it was done and ready to give to my sister today just in time for his Christening.



It's good to have my sewing mojo (or my sewjo as I saw it referred to during the week!) back again. I'm busy getting my list of projects for quarter 2 of the Finish A Long ready to post on Monday. Hope you're having a great weekend!

Learn to Sew: Free online sewing classes

Have you been inspired by The Great British Sewing Bee? Keen to try your hand at sewing, dressmaking and quilting? If so you're in the right place!

I learned to sew in 2008. I did a basic night class (how to turn on a sewing machine, that basic!!) for a few weeks, and then I started reading sewing blogs. Pretty much everything I know, apart from how to thread my sewing machine, and a little bit of basic dressmaking, I learned from free tutorials on the fantastic sewing and quilting blogs out there. I had never done Home Economics/Domestic Science in school, and had never sat behind a sewing machine before I bought a machine in Lidl in August 2008. I'm pretty amazed at some of the things I've managed to make and how many skills I've acquired in the intervening 5 years - I even have a quilt pattern featured in a book being published this spring! 

But more than that, I am constantly amazed at how much I absolutely adore sewing. I really, really love it. I love making pretty things. I love the processes and the satisfaction at getting something right. I love how challenging it is, and how I can constantly push my skill levels to achieve more. The internet is still my go-to source for all sewing related techniques and questions and yes, you can learn to sew from it - I absolutely did!

So - if you are ready to be hooked, what next?

Last year, I ran a very popular series of sewing and quilting tutorials and classes here on my blog for beginners. I called it {Sew} Get Started. It started by explaining the basics and then progressed into a series of tutorials/classes aimed at helping the complete beginner to learn to sew and increasing in complexity as the series progressed. Tutorials were contributed by my very talented sewing friends, who all have blogs of their own.

They're all listed on this page:

If you're not a complete beginner, you might want to dive in with some of the tutorials. But if you just want to learn to sew, start at the top, and work your way down...and then get out there and explore the wonderful world of sewing blogs!

A new kindle cover...

I've been incredibly drawn to a wintery cool colour palette in the last few weeks. It started when I bought a couple of quarter metres of fabric for different projects in the fabric shop on Mother's day - a minty aqua green and a deep grape purple, both with tiny dots in white - and when I stacked them on top of each other on the shelf, I realised that they belonged together in a project. I actually couldn't take my eyes off them, and there was a lot of fabric-strokery going on in my house! After a few days of mulling it over, I decided to add some greys and a few other fabrics in similar colours and hey presto, I got this lovely bundle of cool prettiness:

That was my starting point, but I needed a project for them that would be quick and easy for my time-challenged existence. When I got my Kindle last year, I had intended to make a few different covers to swap it in and out of, but it got away from me, so I decided to do another one - the bonus being that as it was all for me, I could do whatever I wanted with it and not be wondering if someone else would like it.

This was one of those projects that took shape in my head. I had a really clear idea, once I pulled the fabric bundle, what I wanted the cover to look like - randomly pieced squares and rectangles and dense straight line quilting. At first I attempted to work out a little pattern for the piecing so I would get my measurements right but it didn't flow, so I resorted to cutting out pieces and putting them together improv-style as I went along.

Here's where it started:

But the middle was too dense with colour, so I switched it around as I pieced until I got an arrangement I was happy with - no pic as it evolved kind of organically.

I moved quickly on to quilting it very densely with straight lines spaced only 1/4" apart, using my faourite Aurifil 50wt thread in a silvery grey:

I loosely followed Clover and Violet's tute, but got the idea of an elasticated strap closure from another tute (can't remember which, apologies). I also added a fabric casing over the elastic, as my elastic was strong, but not pretty at all. I like how the fabric casing looks, I wasn't sure I would as I thought it might be fussy but I don't think it is. I also added some very stiff sew-in interfacing in the panel under the Kindle to give it a bit of structure - I found it in my interfacing box, its almost cardboard like in texture.

The only thing I was a bit unhappy about was that I slightly undermeasured the height, and hence my binding and elastic were affected a bit, and not as even and crisp looking as I wanted, but I think once I am using it I won't even notice, and I'll definitely be making another cover so I can adjust it a bit then.

All in all, I'm really happy with how it turned out and even happier that I can look at this fabric combo every day!

Also - for those of you moving blog readers, you can now follow my blog easily through Bloglovin by clicking through this link:
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Woohoo! First quilt finish of 2013 :-)))))

 

Those noises you're hearing and wondering what they are? They're the sound of me doing a happy dance that I have finally - almost 3 months into the year - managed a quilt finish. Yippee!

It's a very small quilt - a baby size pram quilt - but a big milestone. Finished this morning as my baba hit the 10 week mark - can you believe how fast the weeks are flying by?  (A hell of a lot faster than the last 10 weeks of pregnancy which were pure torture!) After she was born, I bought a couple of Posy charm packs and when they arrived, I stroked them for a couple of weeks while I was deciding what to do with them. I've wanted to try a tumbler quilt for a little while now, and as the charms lent themselves so easily to cutting into tumbler shapes, I made quick progress once I jumped in and started cutting. I used about 1.5 charm packs - or slightly less - on this, primarily picking the brightest fabrics from the packs.

Back in the Black Friday sale, I bought a yard of Happy Ever After fabric from The Intrepid Thread just because I thought it was lovely - it was one of a few boys and girls fabrics I bought to make sure I had some lovely fabrics in my stash when baby arrived. I really like how it works against the quilt top - totally different, but sweet and girlie also and able to stand on its own enough to make this functional as a double sided quilt.

I quilted it in a random stipple using Aurifil 50wt thread in a light pink, adding in lots of hearts for my gorgeous baby who has truly stolen our hearts! I like how the quilting shows up on this picture I took in the sunlight this morning before washing it:

After that, all that remained was to bind it. I auditioned a few binding choices over on Instagram,  but wasn't really happy with any of them. So I popped off to the local fabric shop and while I was looking at fabrics, noticed they had a premade bias binding in precisely the colour I had been searching for in the fabrics.

I really am happy with the deep purple binding, it works well with the Posy colours and kind of grounds the colours and frames the quilt. (I also might be in love with the premade binding, this was the nicest I've found and super easy and quick to work with. Anything that makes the process easier at the moment!)

And ta-dah, it's done!! I hope you'll forgive me the number of photos for such a small quilt (25 x 36"), but as you can see, I'm very excited to finally have a finish to show you. And here's the lady herself, kicking around happily on it this evening!

I'm working on a few other things - don't forget to pop over and follow me on Instagram where I am posting regular pictures of my work in progress and enjoying looking at what everyone else is working on.
 

Linking up to Fabric Tuesday over at Quilt Story: