First quilt! {drum rolls please}

Ok, here's the last thing from 2011 I'm left to show here and officially tell - It is finished. My very first quilt!

This quilt is not perfect. This quilt doesn't know what it means. And it says - I'm proud of it! And I say - this is my dear, lovely first quilt I made.

As most things it took me a while to have it done. The blocks were made during P2 Patchwork Quilt Along. There was one block per week and somehow I kept the pace, so this piece went quite well. But then, as I decided to make the quilt a bit differently I slowed down ... really, really slowed down. Anyway, it's done now and covers bed in one room.

I'm truly happy with this quilt. I learnt a lot when doing this and I know it's something I enjoy. I thought to make this post as a kind of summary with the mistakes I made. It'll be sort of list "what a beginner can do wrong" :). I'll also be able to check one day if I improved my skills at all or keep repeating the same faults.

So here it is:

1. maybe because of no expierence, maybe because I changed inch to cm but in the end the blocks weren't exactly the same. So, I had to cut some more than they should be

2. definitely not enough safety pins to keep all the layers tightly. This is how it ends with folds:

3. no expierence in moving such big fabric when sewing. The rubber gloves helped a lot but still the length of stitches varies
4. some lines that should be straight were not so in fact...

But, when you don't look into such details it looks quite nice, what do you think :)?

And here are the posts, where the WIP was shown:
Quilting around the House
{After FNSI}
All goes well till the thread runs out
November FNSI

Hardanger tablecloth started

When I wrote about this tablecloth I mentioned I had some more red fabric. Well, to be concise I ordered 10m of it once. For the tablecloth I used 2,5m, which means I still have quite a lot of it. Recently, I started doing another 2,5m tablecloth - this time I wanted to have some border embroidered and this is what I'm working at now. It looks quite nice. I don't know what to embroider in the center of it, yet. Probably, I'll use these stitches as well, so the center matches the border.

Last week, we had a warm, sunny weather - almost summer one. So, I thought it would be good idea to stitch outside. Well, it turned out I didn't do much but I managed to lose the needle somewhere in the grass. The good side of it is that I took these photos, which is - I think - enough compensation for the lost tool.

I realize it looks boring to see new posts that look like the old ones - red fabric, red thread, red tablecloth. But I have some plans to start learning long and short embroidery and to show the progress of learning here. Though, knowing my amount of free time that may not happen as soon as I'd wish. Please, please be patient :).

May FNSI results

For this month's FNSI I decided to start sewing a baby quilt. Some time ago I bought cute fabrics Fox Trails from Riley Blake Designs. It waited a long time for me and finally thanks to FNSI I got motivated to use it.

I knew I'd want to make the quilt from simple squares but over the past week I came with idea on how to put them together and did all the cutting. I had some orange and turquoise solid fabrics and decided to make use of them as well. Last night I placed the squares together and started sewing.

Here is the photo on how I put the squares together:

And more photos on where I am now :):

Today, I had busy day in my garden as the garlic, raspberries and wild strawberries needed some rescue from grass. Tomorrow I'll have to wake up early as we're going on a walk to nearby mountains. This all means that I won't be able to see the results of others work over last night. But for sure I'll be checking this soon. I'm always curious what nice things all the ladies came up with.

No, we didn't go to the mountains. The weather is beautiful but we were too lazy to get up early :). But in turn I'll rest and do some embroidery in the garden. Perfect the same!

May FNSI - baby quilt to sew

A short post to spread the word. This Friday I'll be participating in FNSI. I haven't done that for a while so it's highest time to commit to some sewing. I started cutting squares for a baby quilt, so FNSI is a good way to speed up. Please join with whatever sewing you might have on your mind. Here's the place to do that:

I'll postsome photos of "Work in Progress" over the weekend. Cheers!

Little cool gadget for embroiderers :)

Recently, I long waited parcel knocked at my door. Here what it had inside. I don't use a lot of different colors in my embroidery yet, but I just had such a strong wish to buy a Color Card that I finally did it. It's the DMC Color Card. I mostly chose this one because I wanted to have all the Pearl Cotton colors that are available. It always took me while to decide on the color only looking on the websites. Now, it will always take me a lot of time, to choose among such a huge amount :).

Along with the Color Card, 12 lovely DMC pearl cotton balls came in. I bought them for hand quilting but I guess one day I'll try them in embroidery as well.

First sashico pillow ready, second to go...

This is so very wrong - there are two things I made last year that I still haven't shown here. You can think of some punishment to me for such a delay. But...to not make bad even worse I'm showing the first thing now.

I finished Sashico embroidery for my pillow and put it all together, so now I can have this beautiful piece in my room. Now, I'm working on the second Sashico pillow, as two are better than one :). There are so many variations of Sahico patterns than one can do it a long long time and still create something different. As I read the book about Sashico I could see lots of pictures where a couple of different patterns were used for one thing and it looks just amazing. It's something new I tried and definitely I'll do more Sashico stuff in the future.

As for the "technical" sort of information :): when you look at some pages dedicated to this embroidery you'll see there are specialty fabrics and threads for this, but I just worked on the ones I had at hand and the results are quite good. I used cotton blue fabric that I bought for the Roman curtain and white Petra DMC thread no.8 (similar to pearl cotton). The only "professional" piece I used for it were the Sashico needles.

I also decided to make my own buttons for this pillow with a small pattern on it. Some time ago I saw the button kit that you can make customized buttons with. Why not another cool gadget to my sewing stuff - I thought. It came out very well, though the fabric was quite thick and I had to play a while to make the button. Here's the kit in case you haven't seen such. It can be bought on Etsy and there is variety of sizes to please everybody ;).

On the next post I'll show you the quilt I finished last year. I need to make some photos first. Unfortunately, the weather isn't very pleasing now (no sun:() but hopefully I'll manage this somehow.

Blogger's Choice Bundle

I don't have much experience in buying the fabrics, so most often when bying them I was choosing one collection to be sure I'll get the ones with coordinating colors. But when I saw the contest on Quokka Quilts I thought it might be a good fun to create my own bundle. Or at least to try :). Here's the one I came up with. My favorite color is still turquoise, so I searched for some fabrics with this one and then played around other colors that might fit as well. I ended up in turquoise - brown - yellow palette.

The fabrics are as follows:

Piccadilly Brown Bubble Dots (Quilting Treasures Fabrics)
Kona Cotton Turquoise (Robert Kaufman Fabrics)
Piccadilly Brown Button Dots (Quilting Treasures Fabrics)

Peacock Lane Turquoise Falling Flowers (Michael Miller Fabrics)
Me and My Sister Favorites Turquoise Dots (Moda Fabrics)
Essential Dots Turquoise (Moda Fabrics)

Emma Chocolate Twirling Daisies (Northcott Fabrics)
Kona Cotton Corn Yellow (Robert Kaufman Fabrics)
So Sophie Blue Petal (Riley Blake Designs)

Peacock Lane Yellow Sprinkle Dots (Michael Miller Fabrics)
Piccadilly Aqua and Brown Stripes (Quilting Treasures Fabrics)
I Heart Blue Garden (Timeless Treasures Fabrics)

Treasures and Tidbits Turquoise Starbursts and Florals (Robert Kaufman Fabric)
Kona Cotton Sable (Robert Kaufman Fabric)
Stitch Organic Lagoon Double Arrows (Robert Kaufman Fabric)

All these fabrics are available at The Fat Quarter Shop.