Showing posts with label
Queen's Diamond Jubilee Quilt.
Show all posts
Showing posts with label
Queen's Diamond Jubilee Quilt.
Show all posts
... and we have had the wettest most miserable winter ever, so to cheer things up a bit I have started an appliqué daffodil. This is the daffodil on the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Quilt. The one I am doing now will be very similar, and so far I have done the two stems and have nearly finished the second of the three leaves.
I only have the right hand leaf to do, but this time it will not be gracefully drooping. Doing that curve took an inordinate length of time, persuading it into shape with gathering stitches, water and the iron. Despite taking photographs to record how I did it, I decided it was an experience that wasn't worth repeating. All I can really remember about the whole episode was getting a little too hot and cussy.
So now there is a daffodil in the making, which will be completed by St. David's Day. After that I have to decide whether it will be a wall hanging or the central panel of a quilt.
Hello to Luna of Blueball Mountain, the latest follower - thank you for joining!
Today was my first chance to get a picture of the whole of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Quilt.
It was quite a thrill to see the Judges' Merit rosette attached to it.
There are lots of firsts associated with this quilt - first large quilt with appliqué, first large quilt quilted entirely at home, first quilt made using the quilt-as-you-go method, first quilt show, first ribbon...
When watching Leah Day's videos I remember her saying that to really get to grips with free motion quilting you just need to jump in and do a whole quilt, even if you just use one pattern on the quilt. I'm so glad I took her advice! The meandering pattern I did gave the quilt an all over texture which set off the colours and shapes of the appliqué in a way I really liked.
I often wonder whether Leah ever imagined that people would watch her videos and then get started with free motion quilting on a treadle!
The show is well worth a visit if you can get there. So many fabulous quilts! I took loads of photos, but at the moment I'm not sure whether I will be able to post them here. Show rules...
Update Friday 17th May
This post is now being linked up to Leah Day's blog for Free Motion Friday.
Welcome to the latest follower, handMADEina - thank you for joining!
Thank you everyone for your lovely comments! They are greatly appreciated.
Love,
Muv
Today was the big day - a trip to Malvern to deliver the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Quilt to the Three Counties Showground for the Quilts UK 2013 exhibition later this week. This is just a peep of part of the label on the back. I thought the machines did so well, neither of them misbehaved once, so I gave them a mention on the label.
Exciting week ahead!
Well it's not that boring, it's rather pretty - a close-up of the material I am using to make a hanging strip. I bought yards of this stuff, a nice fresh furnishing cotton, in a sale a couple of years ago. It is ideal for the hanging strip that I have to sew to the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Quilt. I am not looking forward to all that hand sewing. Dull as ditch water.
What I am looking forward to is a nice drive to Worcestershire on 13th May to deliver the quilt to the Three Counties Showground for the Malvern Quilt Show. I've never entered a quilt in a show before. It's a bit scary really.
This is the rose panel on the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Quilt. The pattern for this rose is the first pattern which is available in the online shop at Lizzie Lenard Sewing Designs
It was this time last year that I was busy drawing the patterns for the appliqué panels for the quilt. This rose, to represent England, was the first one that I drew and the first one to be sewn.
In March I took a quick trip up the motorway to Gloucester to visit Oakshott Fabrics and chose the colours for the quilt. I had in mind a rich, deep red for this rose, and I found just the shade I wanted.
The flower is one large piece, with the petals outlined in machine stitching. For this I found that the best colour for the contrasting thread was a rich shade of peach - no other colour worked quite as well.
I would love to see this rose worked in different colours - deep red for romantics or English patriots, pretty in pink for a girl, yellow for a Texan, or perhaps white in memory of a loved one.
A large double bed sized quilt with nine roses in different colours would look great. Who wants to beat me to it?
Welcome to Julie, the latest follower. Thank you for joining!
It's been a busy couple of days, but yesterday we pushed the magic button and published a brand new website for the Lizzie Lenard online shop.
The first pattern in the shop is for the appliqué rose that I drew specially for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Quilt, and I will post pictures of the rose tomorrow.
In the meantime, I thought you might like to see the banner that I stitched specially for the website header - the writing was done with the Singer 99K hand machine and the seams were done on the 15K treadle. The rick rack was sewn on by hand, and the flowers were the little snapped off stems from the lovely big bunch that my husband bought for Christmas.
Is there such a thing as vintage website design?
To see the old year out, here is the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Quilt, made entirely on two vintage machines, my 1927 99K hand machine and 1945 15K treadle, with hand stitched blanket stitch around the appliqué. I finished it a few days before Christmas. So far this is the best photograph I have been able to take. Big quilt, small house, poor light...
Soon enough I hope to have better photos and will tell you a bit more about it, but we are expecting visitors today so I can't linger.
So whether your plans are for a quiet time or a riotous one tonight
Happy New Year!
Love,
Muv xxx
This is what I was wrestling with last week - huge heavy quilted sections that had to be fed through the treadle to join them together to assemble the whole quilt. Ordinary straight pins are not strong enough to hold the thickness and weight. Safety pins could put too much strain on the fabric - the top binding, the strip of white, is a single thickness. Clothes pegs do the job perfectly. You can match the sections where there are joins at a right angle to the seam you are sewing, the pegs are easy to remove as you are sewing, and most important of all, you don't jab yourself.
Update - here is the finished quilt!
... and bring the dining room table back into normal service before this quilt grows big enough to bury everything in sight...
That is the 1927 Singer 99K hand machine just getting in on the picture. It has been doing sterling work.
I am looking forward to no mega-projects next year. Quick and easy will be the theme for 2013. Can't wait.
A snippet of the selvedge from the backing material will be on the back of The Quilt to show where it was made.
Busy day ahead... the 15K treadle has been wheeled across the room so it is now up against the dining table, which will take the weight of the large panels when I am sewing the long seams.
This is the backing fabric for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee quilt which I am working on furiously at the moment. Sometimes when you buy material and love it in the shop you gradually go off it when you are working with it at home.
With this design the reverse is happening - I love it more every day. The detail is delightful.
Last month I took a trip to see some friends in South Wales. I was doing the stitching around the last piece of appliqué on the Diamond Jubilee Quilt at the time. We ended up in a lovely quiet pub where I could relax with a pot of tea and do a bit more of the blanket stitch.
Here is the brimstone butterfly again. I have just finished quilting around the edge of the appliqué.
To give it a bit of extra body I added an extra layer of wadding to fit the shape of the appliqué.
Once the extra layer was tacked in place and trimmed, I used pins to hold the layers in place around the butterfly and stitched around it, using the method shown in yesterday's post.
So there you have it. Stuffed butterfly. Sounds like a delicacy from the declining Roman Empire.
A warm welcome to Allon0711 and Madakamom - thank you for joining as followers!
There is always the fear that the dye will run and that all your hard work will be ruined. Even when fabric has been washed, a dodgy dye can still catch you out.
Once I had bought my collection of colours from Oakshott Fabrics I cut a tiny strip from the edge of each piece and then sewed the strips to a piece of white cotton. Then I washed and dried the test strips, ironing them while damp, to see if any of the colours ran.
I made one test strip before I had washed all the fabric pieces, and a second test strip after washing the fabric. So on one test strip the tiny strips of colour were being washed for the first time, and on the other they were being washed for the second time. The third test strip is of a few additional colours from Oakshott fabrics and a strip of the selvedge of the backing material I used for the Diamond Jubilee wall hanging.
Only one of the colours, one of the dark reds, ran ever so slightly. But I wasn't worried by this, because I had subjected the test strips to some serious abuse - pouring boiling water over them, standing them in the hot water for an hour or so, giving one of the test strips a blast in the microwave to heat the water back up again, leaving the strip lying soggy on a plate for hours. I worked really hard to get that red to run.
So all told, provided the finished quilt is never left in a leaking attic, I am confident that the colours will hold fast.
The strips are also jolly handy for colour matching when you go shopping for threads and matching fabrics.
For a long time I was looking around for a fairly lightweight cotton in a good range of colours suitable for appliqué. In the end I found exactly what I wanted at Oakshott Fabrics. For me the added bonus was that they weren't that far away - a quick zip up the motorway to Gloucester, and I spent a happy hour or so picking the right colours for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Quilt.
Here are the colours I have used, together with the two shades of background fabric I bought elsewhere.
This oak leaf is on one of the panels representing England on the Queen's Diamond Jubilee quilt. Today I am adding the machine stitched veins on the leaves, using a dark mustard yellow cotton. This particular oak leaf can lay claim to having been made in three different countries - mainly at home in England, with most of the blanket stitch having been done in Poland, apart from about six stitches which were done in the Czech Republic. It says it enjoyed its holidays and is quite happy to stay at home now.
Today I have been adding a bit of machine stitched detail to thistle leaves. One of the panels on the Diamond Jubilee quilt is of a thistle, representing Scotland.
Looking at the leaves again, now that it is a few weeks since I completed the blanket stitch, the centres seemed empty, so the machine stitched veins in the middle were today's job. I didn't bother with a stencil. I drew the central veins on the back with fabric marker, so the bobbin thread shows on the front.
Here is the last of the three appliqué butterflies, in a darker shade of yellow.
This appliqué butterfly is based on a brimstone. It was fun doing the pointed wings.
I have just finished this appliqué butterfly this morning as a fill-in detail on the Queen's Diamond Jubilee quilt that I have been slaving over for the last few months. Two more butterflies should be taking flight over the next couple of days.
