Choosing fabrics

Chris got a yummy-but-very-useful Christmas present – each month she gets to choose 3 fat quarters from our local quilt shop Pollyanna Patchwork.  It’s the brainwave of her very smart daughter who has spent enough time in the company of quilters to know just what keeps us happy!  Which got us to thinking about choosing fabrics generally – there are so many out there, just how do you make a start on putting choices together for a project?  And how do you know they will work?  Here’s a few of our top tips -

Start with a fabric you love/don’t mind/quite like, preferably multi-colour

Add in colours (solids or tone-on-tone) that you’ve picked out from your first choice

Try to include light and dark values

Vary the scale of the prints to increase the visual interest – small, medium and large scale prints all have a part to play

If you want a scrappy-but-pulled-together look choose prints that are different in style

See if a stripe or check (or both) adds more character

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The pics above are random selections (with one green leafy fabric appearing in both) - in the first selection there is a good mix of types of print to make it interesting, in the second selection the focus is more on picking out some of  the colours from the colourful feather print and the result is less interesting.

A great way to cheat at all of the above is to find a quilt shop and ask them to help!  We found this cunning wheeze a long time ago at White Cottage Country Crafts (www.whitecottagecountrycrafts.co.uk) - owner Jacquie Taylor has done many years of quilting, teaching and helping others, and she’s got a great “eye” for putting fabrics together (probably why she has a shop in the first place?!).   Jacquie trades at a number of national shows including Quilts in the Garden at Trentham and Quilts UK and her stand is always busy.

Finishing off Christmas

We’re meeting for coffee on Wednesday to compare notes and recover from all things Christmas.  Very little activity of any sort, let alone sewing, so we’ll have to start the New Year very positively!  Barbara’s idea of a really good January 1st is to spend the whole day in a comfortable chair near the fire with some hand sewing or quilting – not sure that will happen.  Chris is hoping to get into her still-quite-tidy sewing room and shut the door for a couple of hours and see what project comes to the fore – not sure that will happen either, but we’re going to try.

For those of you who follow our EQ Doodle page, there are a few new ones posted – we may, as one of our New Year resolutions, start to include yardages and cutting and piecing directions for one or two of the doodles.  Let us know if you think this is a good idea.    Here’s the EQ applique block that features this time -

These are just very basic colourings, not even venturing into the wonderful Stash feature of the program, just enough to show how easy it is to make changes and what a difference background choice can have.  There are so many blocks to choose from, and then there’s the draw-it-yourself option – so many things, so little time! 

 

Merry Christmas to all

22nd December, snow, ice, bitter cold – must be nearly Christmas.  We’re doing all the usual last-minute things as well as  looking back on a busy year of sell-out classes – here are just a few of the quilts/quilt tops that made it back to show and tell …

Merry Christmas everyone – and lots of happy stitching!

Seasonal snow

There’s only one thing to do when it snows – retire to a warm sewing room!  So when the Staffordshire round of snow arrived this afternoon that’s exactly what we both did.  Barbara managed to put together two more Sampler blocks in her room

and Chris was busy writing instructions for our Basically Bags class in January as well as proofreading one of her projects for Patchwork & Quilting magazine, with a few Sampler blocks for company -

Festive quilt plans

Our EQ Doodle page is looking a little more festive too!

Christmas wish list

There are lots of Christmas wish lists everywhere you look (wonder if it is anything to do with the time of year?).  And, if they’re not wish-lists, then they’re what-you-should-wish-for lists.  Entering into the festive spirit of the season we thought we’d see what would be on our quilting wish lists -

Chris would like even more workspace with LOTS of cupboards and shelves so that she could fit in a flatbed table for her regular sewing machine as well as a mid- or longarm quilting machine setup.  She would  also like to have a couple of extra sewing hours in each day to enjoy these wished-for arrangements.   A year’s supply of rotary cutter blades would be needed to keep pace with all the fabric cutting, some new rulers to replace the old faithfuls that have developed interesting nicks…. 

Barbara feels she could use at least two extra sewing hours each day, more space etc etc, a year’s supply of self-installing machine needles, another 3×18in ruler, a new office chair and lots of books from the V&A Museum shop.  With all this in place there would be a possibility that some of the ufos/wips would get finished – or is there something we don’t yet know about that could be put on the wish list that would automatically finish up projects for us?

Wonder what you would choose?

 

 

Sampler Quilt blocks

We’re both moving along with the blocks for the Sampler Quilt class.  Having decided to re-visit 12inch blocks ( a size neither of us has worked with a lot since the mid-80s) we’re finding that the blocks are not as huge or “clunky” as we remembered them.  This probably has something to do with the fact that, these days, we have much wider fabric choices available rather than the old adages of “one print, one plain and one background ” or “one light, one medium and one dark” .  We also have MUCH bigger stashes to work from!  So, within a 12inch block , we are now comfortable with using more than 3 fabrics  and the overall result is visually more interesting – or so we like to think!  Here are two more of Barbara’s blocks so you can see what we mean – the Log Cabin block has 13 different fabrics, the first LeMoyne Star variation has 4 and the second variation, all triangles, has 7.

Now it’s time to go and choose fabrics for the next blocks, which will probably include a couple more of those ever-versatile Log Cabins – Chris has found a really interesting  variation which may show up here when she’s had chance to put it together.

Quilts in the Garden

The conversation over coffee yesterday turned to the topic of quilt shows and the reluctance of lots of folks to enter their work into the larger commercial (and judged) shows.  

We are really lucky here in Staffordshire – we’re within comfortable travelling distance of Quilts UK and the Autumn Quilt Fair at Malvern, the Great Northern Quilt Show at Harrogate, the Festival of Quilts at the NEC in Birmingham and now we have Quilts in the Garden at Trentham and the Quilters one day Sale at Nantwich.  The Trentham show is outrageously close for both of us and we’ll be taking our usual demonstration space again in 2010.  But, quilt shows need quilts,  so we’re going to be doing some “persuading” of students (and, of course, ourselves!)  to enter their quilts for Quilts in the Garden (closing date 31 January 2010 ladies) so that we can support our local show in an appropriate way. 

Quilt shows are about far more than the winners and retail therapy.  Of course, winning quilts are inspirational and to be admired and aspired to, but more often than not it’s the non-winning quilts that are thought-provoking and of great interest to the viewing public – different colour and pattern combinations, different skill levels, different reasons for making, but all combining to provide a feast for the eyes and food for thought.  So, although we’re not going to do anything rash like make New Year’s Resolutions, we are going to be campaigning in 2010 for more of us to enter shows, local or national … we’d love to hear your opinions!

And here are a couple of tops from our Grow Your Own Quilt class earlier this year – wonder if these might be hanging at Trentham in April??

Carried away

Frustrated by the lack of activity and progress on lots of other fronts yesterday Barbara turned her attention to the top of this blog – which is why we now have festive virtual snow drifting gently down the page and appropriately coloured fabrics in the header.  Well, if the techies at WordPress work hard to produce fun stuff it’s up to us to use it!  Plus the weather forecast for the next few days has mentioned cold and frost …

and it’s no surprise that the time of year seems to be affecting some of the colour and fabric choices for those Sampler Quilt blocks!

Work in progress – ?

Chris has been busy making bags – it’s almost turned into a bag-a-thon!  Several enjoyable visits to our nearest quilt shop, Pollyanna Patchwork, have already been required and there will doubtless be a few more before the class in January.  The requirements list for this class should be available on our website in the next few days, or as soon as Barbara gets down to writing up her part of it.

Some progress from both of us on the blocks for the Sampler Quilt class – in amongst all the general pre-Christmas stuff that we all get sucked into – and we’d actually prefer for all the Christmas stuff to go away and just sew our way through the next few weeks…