Dilys The Quilt: BLOG 336

Blog 336

Last Thursday, hurricane DORIS caused me to cancel the lunch I was hosting for friends and kept me indoors. I was on my way to my sewing room when the power went off. What to do? What to do? I couldn’t do laundry, hoover the floor, dig the garden, cut back shrubs, and cook a casserole ……..

So I went to my fabrics and started to tidy them up in a half-hearted sort of fashion and that lasted all of 30 minutes until the power came back on! On a whim, I picked out one of my most luscious and expensive Heidi Stoll-Webber fabrics and started to cut and sew. I am revisiting an old favourite, a block called ’Delectable Mountain’. I cut the fabric into 6” blocks, the most economical cut for the size of the fabric, and placed them into pairs with one warm colour (red, orange and yellow) and one cool colour (blue green and mauve).

Fabric

6” Squares

I drew a line across the diagonal and sewed a line of stitches ¼” away on both sides. I then cut along the marked line to divide the square into 2 half-square triangles. These were pressed ready for the next stage.

Diagonal

Sew and cut

2 half square triangles

On a cutting board, I used a rotary cutter and ruler to divide each square into 4 equal strips. I shuffled the pieces as shown and sewed them together to make a single block. (TIP: In order to produce a mirror image block you need to cut mirror image squares.)

Cut into 4

Shuffle

2 Mirror image squares

2 Mirror image blocks

Potential layout 1

Potential layout 2

In common with many grandparents, I did a bit of childminding during half term week. Ella is 7 and full of energy but always keen to learn so I let her loose on my sewing machine. In the past I have controlled the food pedal and she has moved thepaper/fabric but this time it was all her own work. She placed small pieces of sheer onto a layer of vanishing medium and covered it with a second layer. These were then held tightly into an embroidery frame. She chose to do rainbow colours in sequence and learned very quickly how to scribble in circles. Once complete, we soaked it in hot water to get rid of most of the vanishing medium before placing onto an up-turned bowl so it would dry to that shape. She had no fear of the machine and just did it! It was nerve wracking for me watching her but the frame kept her fingers away from the needle. Phew!

Ella

Thread bowl

The crazy quilt continues to make steady progress and I have even started to join squares together to get a feel of the quilt. I quilted and trimmed each of the pos/neg squares for the Daisy quilt before joining them together using a quilt-as-you-go method. The positive blocks were sewn with close vertical lines using a walking foot; the negative blocks were sewn using free-motion quilting. The complementary colour combination of the fabrics makes it an appealing quilt. Another busy week!