New Quilt- Lavender Lime Floral Dreams

I have spent the last two days designing and stitching a new quilt top that I have called Lavender Lime Floral Dreams. The block layout is made up of nine patches and half square triangles cut from 5 inch strips using a half square triangle ruler. I have been having lots of fun drawing up different combinations with half square triangles lately.

 

Unfortunately the indoor night lighting is not very flattering to the colours used. I will try and get an outside pic after I finish quilting the quilt.

 

The design set used is the  Floral Dreams set from Hatched in Africa. Thy are having a 30% off sale at the moment so that made the set very reasonable to buy. I only used a mauve/purple and green colour palette for the embroideries as well with the gold bud highlights in a couple of the designs. The quilt measures 77 inches square before quilting. I was not going to put the cornerstone designs in but was running very short of the purple fabric so that solved a problem for me.

I will write the tutorial for this quilt if you are interested. Please send me an email if you are.

A Round Up

First up Smart Needle have a new cute free design

Ageless Embroidery have also completed their free Grape Vine font and you need to download those by the end of the month. The letter G has also had a updated version so make sure you download that as well.

Fons and Porter are giving away another fabulous E Book on Basket quilts so make sure you hop on over and pick that one up. In fact one of the design layouts would make a great quilt to put with embroidered blocks.

 

Hatched in Africa are having their annual 30% off sale with 2 hourly super specials over the weekend. If you haven't bought the Aristocat bundle yet to do the Aristocat BOM that bundle would now be $37.80. The Floral Sketches 1 and 2 Combo set would be $28.

I rather like the two new Floral dreams sets, especially set 1. There are 9 designs there that are just perfect for a lovely new quilt. Will have to get my thinking cap on.

Floral Sketches Block 10 - and timely machine maintenance reminder

Block 10 of the Floral Sketches BOM has just been sent out to those who are participating in this BOM.

Floral Sketches Block 10  5x7

Floral Sketches Block 10  6x10

Hatched in Africa have released another Floral Sketches set and if there is enough interest I will do something with that set as well. This is one of the designs from the set. I think that there are enough designs to do something with.

Don't forget if you are doing any of the quilting in the hoop designs such s those I used for the Pierrot quilt to clean out your bobbin area much more frequently that you would otherwise. It is amazing how quickly fluff and lint build up.

Crazy Quilt Block 30

Crazy Quilt block 30 has been sent out to those doing this quilt. We are nearly half way there as there are 64 blocks planned for this showpiece quilt using the Kenny Kreations Crazy Quilt set.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Be Quick on These

Many thanks to Robyn for alerting me to these.

 

Embroidery Library have some lovely freebies called Sunshine up for this weekend only so be sure to go and collect them.

While you are there make sure you join their free Christmas Club. They have offers through until the end of the year and the current free designs for those signed up are the ones below. They are just perfect for making gifts to give to your sewing friends.

 

We are back to rain

A lovely day Monday, all weathers yesterday and today we had a frost with 0 degrees C or 32F first up this morning and now we have rain again.

I have sent out Block 9 of Floral Sketches today to those who are on my Floral Sketches list.

Floral Sketches Block 9 5x7

Floral Sketches Block 9 6x10

What a diffrerence a day makes

Last night we had another very very windy storm with lots of rain. At one stage last night I thought an aeroplane was landing on the roof  We have had wind gusts around 75km/hr  or 50m/hr most of the night) with one wind gust close to 100km/hr and that was probably when I thought the plane was landing on the roof.

However, the early spring bulbs look so much happier today as we have had sun.

The white rhododendron in the background is looking a little worse for wear though. We have had 160mm or 6.5 inches of rain to date in August nearly double our normal average.

Jade, one of my star sewing girls has just finished her first pieced quilt that we designed. It is in a delightful yellow, grey and white colour way. Very spring like. We designed a pinwheel arrangement and inserted the pinwheels into the border as well. Not only that but Jade also made a partially pieced back. Hasn't she done a great job!

Jade's Pinwheel Quilt

 

It is still dull and dreary- yet another rainy day

Woke up this morning to another rain and windstorm. I hate rainy winter days but these have been going on for weeks. This is the view from my sewing room and it just seems to pull all the energy out of me and my enthusiasm has gone down the drain with the water.

 

Here is hoping that tomorrow the sun will reappear. Think it is time to make some lovely minestrone for my Sunday night meal.

 

Small Freebie Round Up

It has been a while since I have done a freebie roundup so I have come up with a few for you.

Embroidery Library have these lovely hibiscus designs for August if you have not downloaded them yet.

Urban Threads have some Sumer Sweeties designs. You get the combined design as shown below but the individual components are also available as singles so be sure to get them all.

Don't forget to keep collecting the Grape Vine Font from Ageless Embroidery.

and the sewing font from the Bernina Blog.

This gorgeous little design is available from the  Designs in Machine Embroidery newsletter page for August. You can download the design directly form that page. The designs is compliments of EmbroideryOnline and is art of their new design set Doodle Line Quilting. Check out how they have coloured the design in

 

 

There are also many lovely downloads on the Bernina website to go with projects in their magazine but they can be easily used for other things. Other formats other than art. are included in the download zip. You can find the links to download all the designs on the right hand side of the website page. These two designs are on a cushion



 This one is used to embellish a bag

While these are used to embroider the front and button covers of a jacket shirt

 If you go to this page you can click on past issues. That will take you to the page for that particular issue and most of them have free download links on the right hand side of the page. There are Easter baskets and all types of goodies in the Easter edition.

 

Make sure you pick up the pattern for the lovely elephant and his embroidered rug in the Special Living Edition.

 

Although this design is super large if you have software you can split some of this design off ad it would make a fantastic modern pillow. This download is in Issue 47

This is what I came up with after a play in Embird.

 

 

 

 

 

New Sewing With Nancy Video Series

For those wanting to do the Pierrot quilt with the 5x7 background quilting designs, Anita from Chrystal Embroidery now has that size up for sale on her website. You can access them here 

 The latest series of Sewing with Nancy video series has started. Episode 1 is titled Sew Big Quilt Blocks.You can view the first one here. You can also view previous ones on this page. When you watch this video keep in mind how you can adapt this idea to a machine embroidered quilt with some additional mathematical calculations to get it to a smaller scale. Think I will have a go at making an adaptation of this down the track so keep posted.

 Obviously if you are making a machine embroidered quilt this way you cannot put all the blocks together in a haphazard way as they are in the video. I think it is a great idea.

Fons and Porter also have another free Ebook giveaway. This one is called Block Buster and has 100 quilt Blocks and can be downloaded from this link. The finished block sizes would be great to incorporate into machine embroidered quilts.

 

 

 

 

Great Machine Embroidery Thread

With all the black and white Pierrots I stitched out and doing all the white quilting on my feathered star quilts I was nearly tearing my hair out with thread breaks. All of my embroidery machine appear to not like damp humid weather and the black and white especially shred and break frequently. I decided to try the Gem Embroidery thread (polyester)and can I say I am sold on this. I have nearly used up one of the  reels I have bought of the white and not one thread breakage and that is using all of my machines including the Brother 10 needle.

If you live in Australia it is well worth trying out this thread. You can buy it from Happy Embroidery. It is a very reasonable price and arrives the next day in a post satchel. You need to email the owner Sava at Happy Embroidery or call the 1300 number on the site.

I am not way associated with this company, I am just a very happy(pun) customer.

Thank You

My sincerest thanks to everyone who has sent me a personal email or left a comment since we received the sad news about Millie. While she still enjoys laying in the sun, getting on the roof  to sunbake and eating we will try and keep her with us. We have had to put two of our cats to sleep in the past and although it is difficult to do it is the kindest thing as I hate to see animals suffer .

On a brighter note Paula sent me a pic of her quilt to share with you. It is the Pretty in Pink Elephant Quilt, obviously done in blues. Doesn't it look great!

Not good news

See received the devastating news yesterday that Millie has cancer in the bone and tissue around her jaw. We will cherish the remaining quality time that we have left with her.

Last night we had very strong winds and storm. The power went off at 8.30 so off we went to bed. It was pitch black as you can imagine with not one street light on anywhere. A very large clap of thunder woke us both with a start at midnight as the whole house shook.

A Day of Lesson Writing

Today has been spent catching up on writing lessons and sending them out. That is probably a good thing as on the whole it has been wet and dreary again.

 

The tutorial for the Pierrot quilt has been sent out to those who have requested it and Anita from Chrystal Embroidery tells me that she has had quite a few of you buying the  200mm x 200 mm or 8x8 inch background quilting designs. She will be having 5x7 designs up later on in the week hopefully, just waiting on her webmaster. I will be designing other quilts incorporating these background designs, the first being a Zoo Friends one using the designs from the Quiltery

 

I have also sent out Block 29 of the Kenny Kreations Crazy quilt BOM

Crazy Quilt Block 29

Crazy Quilt Block 29 Detail



Crazy Quilt Block 29 Detail 2

Crazy Quilt Block 29 Detail 3

 Block 8 of the Floral Sketches BOM has also gone out to those receiving the lessons. Both of these blocks are the same finished size at 16 1/2 inches so they are interchangeable