Scandinavian Style Quilt

It's finally finished! The red and grey sofa quilt has been machine pieced, hand quilted and edged in a stripey binding ready to snuggle up on the sofa with.  

I like machine piecing during the summer so that I can hand quilt in front of the fire during the winter. It's a very simple design of squares and rectangles edged with a figured white cotton.  

But I can't rest on my laurels because I have another quilt to finish and a new one to start for a very special person.....  

All my patchwork and quilting inspiration is on my Pinterest board HERE

Feeling Poorly - what to do?

Linen curtain remnants

I've not been very well lately so I haven't been able to get to the studio and make glass for a couple of weeks. It's boring being ill, there's only so many films I can watch and books I can read and sleeps I can sleep so I thought I'd do a bit of sewing.

Having chopped the bottom off a pair of silver grey linen curtains I am left with a length of fabric, ideal for making some napkins.  I ironed Bondaweb to the back of a piece of red patterned cotton fabric and cut the bid shapes out, then ironed it onto the front of each napkin.  After pressing it flat I machine stitched each birdy and now have four useful (if a bit creased) napkins. 

Voila! Took an hour. Now I'm thinking: lampshades, table cloths, tea cosies......

Stitches through Time

My friend Eileen and I were looking through a photo album and reminiscing about our Silsden Quilt Group that we used to attend when the children were small. Not an organised group - more a collection of friends with a love of sewing and a need to spend an evening away from the family! 


We were looking at the photographs of our only exhibition, Stitches Through Time, which was held at The Dales Countryside Museum, Hawes in the Yorkshire Dales in 2000. 

This was an idea that three of us had to show a history of quilting in Yorkshire and how quiltmaking has changed from a practical necessity to a past time and also how quiltmaking has had a revival in the past twenty years. 

We placed an advert in the Craven Herald requesting the loan of old quilts and we had a great response. We travelled around North Yorkshire collecting up quilts from farms, houses and an antiques dealer. Each quilt was loaned to us on trust so it was a huge responsibility.  and there were some beauties! One quilt from Settle still had the original backing papers attached -  which were the original hand written milk bills dating back to the 1920s.  Another quilt was a fine example of Victorian applique from Long Preston and a crazy patchwork of velvet, silk and embroidery came from Embsay.  We even had some adventures whilst collecting the quilts including, getting lost, entering the smelliest house on earth and being chased by a herd of cows! 

We had a great time setting up the exhibition with a lot of help from Fiona and Debbie at the Countryside Museum with the old quilts were hung from the walls of the gallery and our quilts displayed on the boards.  We had a table to sell small quilts and to demonstrate our sewing skills and Eileen researched the tradition of quilt making in Yorkshire. (There isn't much. Unlike Durham and Wales there isn't a particular style of quilting in Yorkshire - most quilts were made just for practicality rather than heritage). 

Although there were just three of us exhibiting at the museum (Eileen, Jane and myself) we each have a distinctive style and colour palette which made for an exciting and contrasting show. Eileen likes earthy tones, using yellows, russets and blues and her quilts explore and rework the American tradition of machine pieced and hand quilting.

Jane has a fascination for tribal and ethnic designs with a vibrant palette of blues, purples, sea greens and jades. She loves African applique and batik fabrics. 

I was taught American machine piecing from Eileen and my colour schemes are more "in-yer-face". I love Japanese indigo-dyed fabric and clashing colours.

Jane, Eileen and Jo

So here we all are at the preview evening of the exhibition. (This photo was taken 10 years ago!) The exhibition plus the daily 3 hour round trip to Hawes left us exhausted and we haven't repeated the  experience.  But we had a fantastic time - quiting, talking to people about quilting and selling our smaller quilts. Since then we have continued to sew separately (Eileen won an award at the Quilter's Guild the following year) and the skills we learned 10 years ago have stayed with us today. 

Follow I Love Red 2 for sewing tips, stories and free patterns. 

Sew and Sew

My Mum taught me to sew on an old Singer hand machine that was her Grandmother's (which makes it over 100 years old) and I still have the machine too! She taught me how to lay out a pattern so that it was economical with the fabric - much to annoyance of my needlecraft teacher, who made me unpin it all and follow the instructions. At school I spent a year making an apron but at home I made patchwork cushions, tea cosies and needle cases.

When my children were small I started making patchwork quilts in earnest and, tutored by my American neighbour Eileen, learned to piece on the sewng machine and hand quilt. We made a lot of quilts and we even had an exhibition of quilts old and new at the Dales Countryside Museum. It was so much fun - we travelled around North Yorkshire borrowing old quilts from local farms and houses to show alongside our "modern" quilts. There was one quilt that still had the backing papers inside, cut from old milk bills and a beautiful example of an applique chintz quilt. It was an exciting exhibition with Eileen, Jane and myself sitting there publicly quilting.
So I have the sewing bug again and have dusted off my old Frister Rossman electric sewing machine and dragged the basket of fabric pieces out of the attic cupboard. I'm making bags and have created prototypes for three designs - a tote/shopping bag, an evening bag and a messenger bag. I have so much scrap material that I had forgotten I had including chintz, brocade, cotton and silk. Enough to go into bag production!

Prototype evening bag showing chocolate silk lining.

Too unstructured, more like a bag for a bridesmaid.

Prototype Evening bags #2

They need a gusset to make them more 3 dimensional and a magnetic clasp. They have a small pocket inside.

Protoype Messenger bag.

The binding is too thick and bulky.

Prototype Messenger bag #2.

Has a wooden toggle and an inside pocket.

Prototype tote bag.

Fully lined. Needs an inside pocket.