Juliette's Quilt

Juliette is my son Harri's girlfriend and she is absolutely lovely. Draped over  the sofa in London where my children live, is one of the first quilts I made and Juliette has always admired it ( even though I wince when I see it due to the dreadful piecing and quilting!)

So when I volunteered to make her a quilt , she asked for me to remake this quilt but with a lot more yellow in it (as this is her favourite colour). 

The block is fiddly to make and I've ended up with quite a few extra blocks . I've also made enough extra small hourglass blocks to make another quilt with the addition of some solid fabric. it was easier to make 2 identical hourglass blocks than to sew all those small triangles together.

So here is the finished quilt :

I managed to finish it in time for her birthday and she seems to like it! I made it on a sort of production line method with a lot of chain piecing. Even still, the blocks are only 6 inches square finished and towards the end I found it quite tedious. I also made too many blocks and cut up too much fabric into triangles  but these will be used for yet another quilt ( different from the hourglass blocks)

Quilt stats

Size: 72 x 72 inches

Pattern: Dalarna by Mariet Souethout- Mous in Quiltmania ( no 68)

Fabric front: mixture of quilting cottons including some Karen Lewis, Lizzy House, Jen Kingwell etc etc.

Back: Heather Ross Tiger Lily in canary ( cotton lawn rather than quilting cotton)

Binding: Lizzy House Natural History in raisin

Wadding: 100% cotton

Quilted with Glide in  Military Gold on top and decobob yellow  (138) on bottom

This was the final quilt I managed to quilt before my Handiquilter stopped working most likely because the timing is off. I'm waiting for it to be fixed.

This quilt was also in my FAL Q3 list ( no 2 ) so I will be linking up at the appropriate time. Sadly unless my machine is fixed soon, I'm not going to get much of my list done.

Jo's Blue Star Quilt

I haven't blogged for a while but I have several posts in my head that need to be written. I don't seem to have much motivation at the moment, don't know why but that's a different issue.
Anyway, some time ago now, the lovely Jo ( @joanne333jones on IG) told us that she was moving to Denver, Colorado with her husband's job. Jo has been a terrific bee mate since we met at the first FQR retreat in 2012 and we are all going to miss her terribly. So I did the obvious thing and thought we must make her a quilt. The pattern I chose was Kasbah Chic by no hats in the house which was published in Love Patchwork and Quilting, in her favourite blue colours.
In actual fact the pattern was an absolute bitch, even though the end result was fabulous. The templates provided for the corner segments gave very poor results and the half square rectangles ended up too small. We ended up paper piecing our own corner segments and fudging the rectangles. My fellow bee members were all cursing me for choosing this particular pattern and I was wondering if anyone tests these patterns.
We all met up in London in June  ( in Tate Modern for the Georgia O'Keefe exhibition) and were able to give the quilt to Jo.

I had such fun quilting this and trying to line up the front and back ! ( I didn't succeed but it's close enough).

I made a star label for the back.

And here is Jo holding up her quilt in the restaurant at Tate Modern. There were a few tears from all of us.

The blocks were made by myself, Jane @picosailors, Moira @ kettleboiler ( who also provided the binding), Sue @ suespatch12, Sue @justsewsue and Teresa @hillyfilly. We were all in the original Kinky Bees group which later became the FQR Bumbling Honeys quilt bee. 

We all wish Jo well in her new life in the USA and she will be back in a year or so, so it's not forever.

I'm really looking forward to visiting her in the future and getting the inside info on the best quilting shops in Denver.