Trellis Quilt is Finished

Introducing my sixth ever finished quilt: I am calling it the Garden Trellis!  The sun was shining for one morning this week and I was lucky enough to be at home with the Mister, so we dashed up the hill behind our house and took some photos of it, at long last.

I have written a post about the construction of this patchwork top in November, over here.
I took it to Beechwood Quilting in Stirling, Scotland to get it quilted with a swirling stitch in some orange/green/purple variegated thread.  They had it done within two weeks and only cost £83, (that included the wadding) which is much cheaper than the cost to my sanity if I had tackled the job myself.

Brian, who quilted this for me, praised my piecing too.  He said that with so many small pieces he would have expected some stretched kinks and bumps, but my work was very flat and easy to work with.  Yay for me and all that pressing!

 So here are a few more photos of me and my lovely quilt.

I was so pleased to finally see some sunlight that I just put my coat and wellies over my PJs and we raced up the hill to take some shots.  You can at least see some of the backing fabric I chose in this shot though.

In too much of a rush to wait for hair styling or make-up.

I love this shot with the sheep on the hill below us.

One last photo, before the sun is completely covered again.

Back inside, OK, just one more: The obligatory photo of "Cats on Quilt".

Mr Darcy and Mr Bingley, our two Ragdoll cats.
Their names perfectly match their personalities too.

This has been a goal of mine to finish before the end of 2013.

Linking up with Finish-A-Long

Sewing and Pressing and Cutting OH MY!

I have been a busy bee over here at Nessa's Place!  Check out all of these pressed seams!

I have a number of sewing books on my shelves that I enjoy browsing but have never actually made anything from them - that was until I bought a Kaffe Fassett / Phillip Jacobs bundle of 30 fabric strips and needed to find something to do with all those lovely colours and patterns.  These bundles of 40 fabric strips are commonly called jelly rolls, but my bundle only contained 30 so I needed to find a pattern that could adapt easily to various quantities.
And I did find one!  The pattern I found for this quilt required only 20 strips of fabric, so I just made it a bit bigger to incorporate my 30 strips, and added a few extra in too (7 blue ones as well as background fabric).
Here I am sharing the process of creating this quilt, but feel free to just look at the pictures - they are fairly self-explanatory.  It really is just a LOT of sewing and pressing and cutting... oh MY!

Just the Preparation is a Mammoth task!

I started with two metres of white fabric and cut it into 44 strips of 2.5". 

Then I sewed my 30 colourful strips of fabric to either side of one white strip, and 14 white strips to either side of one dark strip (I had some dark toned blues in my stash so I used those - the original pattern used red and it looks great with red too)

PLEASE NOTE: If you are following this to make one yourself, I would like to say that I wish I had done 8 of the blue sets as I did end up with enough of the coloured sets to have made another row in my final quilt.  But this would also mean you would need a bit more white, so perhaps buy a quarter of a metre extra just to be sure.

Using a sharp rotary cutter and ruler, cut every single strip set into 2.5" wide strips.  This took HOURS!

I ended up with two lovely piles - 122 blue centres and 255 coloured sides.  Then sew them together to create a nine-patch block.

I was left with a very tall pile of 115 nine-patch blocks, with warm blue centres, all completed.  Now this would have been enough satisfying work for anyone.  But unfortunately the cutting and sewing isn't over!

The disappearing nine-patch

Now for more sewing and pressing and cutting...oh MY!
Using the clear ruler, I lined up the edges of the blue square on the 1" line and sliced every single one of these babies up!

After all of that cutting, and the removing of a few slipped and miss-cut pieces, I ended up with 457 usable pieces.

Now to stitch them into strips, with the little blue squares all facing the same direction.  I sketched out the book's layout onto some graph paper with the original 236 squares and then drew in my extra squares to make a total of 436. 

 (I knew I would have some leftovers so I took out my least favourite ones, but if you want to make it, you'll be able to use all your squares if you just do one extra strip of white/blue/white at the beginning)

This was always going to be 'on-point' so I needed to add setting triangles to each end of the strips. The longest strips are 25 squares wide!  (The setting triangles are created by cutting 5.75" squares then cutting these into triangles.  The four corners are made by cutting one 3.5" square and dissecting it into triangles)

At least now there is no more cutting to be done - just more sewing and pressing... oh Yay!
Hopefully this will be big enough to cover a single bed.

Now for the Quilting

Although I did toy with the idea of using this quilt as a vehicle to hire and learn how to use a long-arm quilting machine, I have decided not to do the quilting at all.  I haven't as yet found any love or joy from the quilting part of making quilts, so I will pay someone to quilt this little lovely for me - But first I need to find some backing fabric before I can make an appointment with a quilter.  I look forward to sharing photos of my completed quilt!
N.B. The Trellis Quilt is now complete!  View it over here.

Autumn Quilting Plans

Firstly a lovely Thank You to anybody who voted for me in the Viewer's Choice of Favourite Mini Holiday Quilts.  I did not win Judge's Choice nor the Viewer's Choice, nor one of the randomly drawn prizes.  But I do get to live with my sweet little Isle of Skye quilt, and without the competition I may never have finished this little wall hanging, which makes me smile whenever I walk past it, and so for that I am thankful.  And so onto the future:

Recently I posted my garment sewing goals for Autumn here, so I thought I would also set out my crafty sewing goals too.

Hand Sewing

I started piecing together some little hexagons from Very Berry fabrics.  I don't know what I will do with them yet, but so far I have started stitching them into flower shapes.  By the end of the year I would like to have them become a part of something.  Ideas anyone?

Late last year I bought a DVD to teach myself how to do needle-turned applique and then signed myself up for a Block of the Month set of patterns.  I now have all nine patterns but have only finished four blocks.  I am being VERY hopeful putting this one down as a Finishing goal, but I love the idea that in a perfect world I may actually get this finished!

Patchwork

I bought a lovely jelly roll full of Kaffe Fassett and Philip Jacobs pastel prints that I want to make into a sort of trellis patchwork quilt.  So far I've prepared my strips ready for the cutting and sewing into 9-patch blocks, but that is all.  I think this has a good chance of being completed as it is fairly easy sewing and will all be done by machine.   Although I do enjoy learning new skills with each of my creations, perhaps I will set this on point too, and maybe enroll myself in a Long Arm course and then quilt it myself?  Now those would be very useful new skills to have.

I am linking up with lots of other quilting ladies who are recording their goals for the rest of 2013.