Spring Cleaning

I thought drawing the spiral on the fabric in pen could go horribly wrong – even if it does have 2 sides! An easier and less fraught way is to iron it into place and reposition as needed. After that I put it on the glass table top and tacked it on with very large stitches; simple.

The second difficulty I had was doing the needle turn applique partly because the fabric glue I bought was useless so I used a quilting pin to hold the leaves in place. This didn’t really work as it didn’t hold it flat enough to the fabric. The ends of the leaves, I found particularly fiddly and I did not want to use the freezer paper method. The precision of this method doesn’t go with the naïve style of this quilt.

In the end I tacked the edges under and once the end of the leaf was attached to the spiral there was no need to glue it in place, I just held it with my thumb which allowed for some manoeuvring if need be. In the end I made too many leaves but I squeezed them on anyway!

IMGP4368

When it came to quilting, I had lots of embroidery thread but only a couple of spools of perle cotton. I am following Sarah on Facebook so I emailed her to ask if embroidery thread was ok. She kindly replied the same day and said that the stranded embroidery thread would split and to stick with perle. An order on EBay sorted that out.

I enjoyed the handwork for this project and remembered how much I used to like embroidery – I got grade A for ‘O’ level embroidery – don’t know anyone else who has it. Most people don’t know it exists!

This is a very enjoyable project for hand sewers just right for Slow Sunday Stitching, but not if you love your machine.

And the title? Originally this was on a page but I tidied up the page to change this to a link

Spring!

The purpose of this dolly quilt is to teach you how to use needle-turn applique to attach bias strips; you get lots of practice with this lovely swirly design as you can see from the photo. To make it easier Sarah suggests buying ready made bias strip, I couldn’t get a nice spotty one but I like the bright green of the plain one that I found

IMGP4425 Spring basted vertical

 

You also learn Sarah’s method of needle-turn applique for the leaves, using a silver gel pen to mark the template outline. This outline forms the edge to be turned under. This way there is no need to worry about freezer paper, gluing, ungluing or seam allowances, etc. It is easy to position the template where you want it if you like to fussy cut. Thinking about it you could even use this method to draw freehand if you are confident enough

I love the colours of this mini quilt, purple is a favourite colour and I used to wear lots of it whether it was in fashion or not.
I changed this slightly from the 21 x 20 inches to 21 inches square. Sarah suggests using it as a cushion but I thought it would make a nice picture and it would be easier to buy a frame if it was square. They have nice box frames in Ikea but I should have checked the sizes as it is slightly too big for their large box frame – I won’t make that mistake again!

I haven’t hand quilted before but enjoyed the process – I like finishing binding by hand too. both are lovely jobs to curl up on the settee with while you watch a film

Now it is finished it is pegged up on the line in my little workroom