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More Birds!!

Last week in the Drift QAL, we faced the curve—and won! read more

Tackling the Curve

Piecing a curve together might feel a little scary at first. There’s something so simple and comforting about a straight line—but a curve? A curve is definitely not a straight line. When you’re working with curves, you’re dealing with bias edges, which can stretch and shift. You’re joining two pieces that look like they shouldn’t fit together. It might even seem like you’re gathering fabric when you’re not!

And just like in life, there are many ways to do the same thing—and no single right or wrong way ...

 It took me the first week of January to finish my biggest "debt" from last year. I posted about work in progress on it back in July and finished the top speedily, but then it had to wait for its turn to be quilted.

I designed the pattern specifically to use a sunset-coloured fat quarter bundle and my vision was based on stained glass cathedral windows (as you can see from some of the shapes that make up the background). Every quilter is familiar with the stained glass effect you get if look at a top against light, and here ...

We had a great virtual AGMof the Irish Patchwork Society last Saturday, and as usual, one of the highlights was a quilt challenge, this year it was to make a 15'' flower block using one colour only (various tints and shades of it).

Mine was a simple stylised flower in a sort of pinkish-purple colour which I don't even know the name of. Would you call it magenta? fuchsia? orchid? My phalaenopsis is kind of similar.

Initially, I planned a wallpapered focus wall for my new living room, then the plans changed. I decided to have a mural instead, but I kept it simple, a stylised line drawing forming a sort of a frame with an empty space in the middle of the wall. And that empty space was meant for... a quilt, of course.

So, here it is, all done, but it's not on the wall yet, so we'll have an interior design update later, and for today it's all about the quilt. 

It follows the bedroom quilt in being purely abstract ...

This one has been mentioned a couple to times, you can see it in progress here and here, but it has since been quilted, so here's a little update on that.

I wanted to go totally Art Deco with it, pure abstract, although I do regard it as an allegory, I'm just not saying what of, suffice it to say it was meant for the bedroom.

As the shapes are quite simple I wanted to add detail with quilting using a lot of variations on pebbles, spirals, arches and s-curves.

The quilt design is symmetrical, so the quilting ...

 To clear my backlog - here is one my favourite recent quilts, which has not made it to the blog for some reason yet.

I was very impressed by the possibilities of combining layer cakes with stack-and-whack techniques and thought I'd experiment with that some more. Previously, I had used a similar approach with improvised curve piecing, where each 4-piece stack was cut free hand in its own way, you can check out the Airways quilt and the Splash of Neon one. This time I wanted to cut all the squares in the exact same way to be able to ...

Ta-da! A big finish:

I haven't posted anything for some time now, but I have three quilts in different stages of progress in the works now. I am supposed to be quilting the bedroom quilt, but I got carried away with an idea I had while waiting for the threads to arrive. 

There are some designers out there that have a wonderful eye for modern quilt design that make me a tad envious of their aesthetic… They design the kind of art I would love to have in my house as wall art, or on a mug, or as wrapping paper! And the quilts in Quilt Modern Curves & Bold Stripes by Heather Black and Daisy Aschehoug is exactly that.

Heather from Quiltachusetts and Daisy from Warm Folk teamed up to design and write an inspired book all about making curves and stripes with a modern difference. Ain’t nothing drunkard about these ...

The third section of Mini Masterpieces is all about curves – simple, complex, and improv. Are you ready to get your curves on?!

Preorder Mini Masterpieces from these stockists

Simple Curves

What are simple curves? Where two pieces become one… square unit/block.  Like a Drunkards Path unit.

Jane for Ava & Neve made four of the sampler quilt block and turned it into a mini quilt – how beautiful are those colours?

Nicole from Modern Handcraft was the first person to come to mind to ask to join in the book hop for Simple Curves. Nicole and drunkards path blocks are synonymous ...