Big French Knot Project

This is my Big French Knot Project. Not big in the way of Picasso's Guernica, or Rembrandt's Night Watch but it's still a lot of French Knots! It's an experiment and so far it's turning almost as I had in mind. :)

Liberty Bird (part two)

Often the reason I stop working on something is because I'm not sure how to continue with a piece and I'm pretty sure this was the case with this project. But when I pulled this Tufted Titmouse  embroidery from the WIP basket I suddenly *knew* I had to add some stitching to the background.

I'm using colours that are similar to the colours used in the fabric design but generally they are more bold and I'm adding some variety in the shades as well. From afar the stitching on the background isn't immediately obvious but up close it's really nice. :)

Five favourite Scrap Quilts

1. The Technicolour Yawn (better known as the Scrap Vomit Quilt, pictured above). I have finished a rather big quilt top using this tutorial and it's perfect for all your good, bad and ugly scraps. Especially for fabric designs that are less easy on the eye. :)  The only thing you need to add are two solids although with some clever scrap sorting you can probably replace those with scraps too. Find links to the tutorial here and a fabulous version of the quilt made by Katie here (she made a few actually, they are all lovely)

2. I made a fun quilt based on a pattern in the Sunday Morning Quilts book which is a great book if you are interested in making scrappy quilts. For this particular quilt it helps to have a good scrap stash of many different colours and again you can hide some odd designs in there, as long as they have the right colour.

My Spider web mini quilt WIP

3. String or Spider web quilts are perfect for using up longer pieces of scrap fabric. Currently I'm making a Spider web mini quilt (inspired colour wise by this one) and I used this super easy tutorial on the House a la Mode blog. For String blocks I can recommend the paper pieced String block Tutorial on the Film in the Fridge blog.

Block made by Julia Frick

It's like one giant Value Block! Quilt by Amber of One ShaBby ChiCk

4. Value quilts. There are the low volume quilts of course. They are very lovely but I wonder if anyone except professional quilters have enough low volume scraps to make an entire quilt with them? Judging from the number of 'low volume' fat quarter bundles offered in online fabric shops I guess the answer is 'no'. Then there are the Value Quilts that make use of the Value and contrast of values in colours like in the quilt block and quilt shown above. This is the only type of quilt I haven't tried yet but I definitely want to make a Value Quilt one day. I have bookmarked this tutorial on the Sew Katie Did blog.

Postage stamp Quilt by Tammy

Postage stamp Quilt by Kristen

5. Postage stamp quilts. I once made a feeble attempt to start one but made the mistake of choosing a low volume palette and I just didn't have enough scraps for that (see 4) Basically it's just lots of tiny squares stitched together. You can sort them by colour, sew them in blocks with sashing, alternate patterned squares with solid squares, the possibilities are endless. There's a good tutorial on the Red Pepper Quilts blog.

Hope you enjoyed my favourite Scrap Quilts, please let me know yours!

Flowery stitching

Remember this Bear & Fish project? I started it a long, long time ago and every now and then I add something. Mostly to try out stitches or floss. I finished stitching the rose last week. It's a weird mix of red, pink and orange shades as I only used lonely threads from my jar with floss left-overs. I think it works. The big Dahlia-type flower on the right is next but I did choose threads from my regular stash for that as I just didn't have a big enough variety of orange and yellow in my jar. The whole image is turning out a bit kitschy but I'm ok with that. :)

Double Dutch Quilt Along plus Spin-off

I really enjoy the Double Dutch Sampler Quilt Along. So far I've made several blocks based on two tutorials by my fellow Quilt Along-ers: the House block (second on the right in the photo below) and the Diamond-Plus block (second on the left). All the other blocks are things I improvised, blocks I enjoy making and there's even an 'orphan' X and Plus block I found in my stash that fits the colour scheme!

This is just a small selection of the blocks I made, there wasn't any room left on the little improvised 'washing line'. :) Anyway in the Double Dutch QAL group on Flickr I spotted some so called 'Economy' blocks. I had heard and seen Economy blocks before but hadn't made any myself and a Sampler Quilt is perfect to try out blocks you haven't done before! So I made three for the Sampler Quilt but didn't stop there and started a new quilt. An Economy block spin-off of the Double Dutch Sampler Quilt!

Again this is just a small selection (I think I have about 35 to 40 blocks now), just to give you an idea of the Happy Colour Scheme and fabrics I'm using. There's lots of Heather Ross' Briar Rose in the blocks and a lot of stash and scrap fabrics too. The Heather Ross fabric is really lovely to work with and has lovely bright, sunny prints of bees, clover, frogs, flowers etc. I saw some on sale here and here if you are interested.

I used the Red Pepper Quilts tutorial for the Economy block and you can find links to the House and Diamond/Plus blocks and more Quilt Sampler inspiration here.

As it's quite summer-y over here I guess progress on these quilts will be a little slow in the next few months. I have already taken my huge English Paper Piecing Project with Hexagon flowers from the WIP stack. A great hand sewing project when you are out and about and not in a hurry to finish :)

Rabbit on a dress

Just a few days ago I wrote about Michele Carragher and the embroidery work she did for the Game of Thrones series. It really inspired me to try and embellish my own clothing with embroidery. I have had this black 'baby cord' (really fine cord) dress for at least 6 years and I thought the plain, soft and not too thin fabric was the perfect candidate for my experiment!

First I traced the rabbit on some tissue paper (the wrapping kind of tissue paper, not the other type of tissue paper). I then stitched the outline of the rabbit on the fabric by stitching a kind of running stitch through the paper. It wasn't perfect but I covered the wonky looking stitches later when I started stitching the fur and it was the only method I could think of with the materials I had on hand.

I then continued to embroider like I usually do, except it's a little less subtle. I used two strands instead of one for example and while the cord is not too bad to stitch on, it's not like the very fine cotton satin I usually stitch my furry creatures on, so I shouldn't expect the same result, right? I'm not quite finished with this rabbit but it's nearly done I think...and after that I plan to add flowers, or branches, leaves that kind of stuff.

p.s. Luna made the first photo, where I'm wearing the dress as it's kind of hard making a photo of yourself wearing something and I think she did great. Yay Luna!