Memory Quilts

I'm still plodding along with the batting scraps.  I used up three bobbins of thread sewing them together so far!  I've mostly got small amounts left now that I use to make Memory quilts for stillborn babies at Sunshine hospital, Victoria.  Here are a few of the ones I've made over the years.  Sometimes they're orphan blocks or scraps I'm trying to use up.  I try to make something nice in the hope that the babies' parents get a little comfort out of them.

This bird was done during an appliqué and stitchery class I did once.

I used up tiny scraps of fabric to make these hexi flowers.

More scraps.

Scraps of fabric leftover from a larger Dresden Plate quilt.

This was a block from a BOM I didn't complete.  

I've made hundreds of little quilts and unfortunately, there's need for more all the time.  These quilts measure approximately 12 x 14 inches depending on the fabric I have.  As you can see, they're all very different.  The hospital has the parents choose the quilt they would like so I try to make sure there's a selection of different designs.

 

Batting Scraps

I finished drawing all the diagonal lines on the rugby stars fabrics so that's all ready for retreat next week.  I took my cutting board into the kitchen so I could mark the lines as I was pottering in there.  Would you believe that my son came along and used it as a food prep chopping board?!  He is still alive.  Just ;-) 

I can't work on my dancer picture until I get the pictures enlarged so I had to find something else to do.  That something else was something I've been putting off doing for a very long time...

Sorting batting scraps! I have a lot of scraps of batting!  Some have been donated because I make a lot of charity quilts and others have come off the ends of larger quilts I've quilted on the longarm.  I was storing them in these large laundry bags but age and sunlight have got the better of them and they've started to disintegrate.  The goal is to turn fairly large scraps into bigger scraps and then store them inside the washable laundry bags you see on the table.  They're labelled with the size of batting so if I make a quilt top I can clearly see if I have a size suitable for that project before I lazily just pull another sheet off the batting roll!

I straighten up the batting scrap edge.

 

Then zig zag stitch it to another straightened scrap edge.

I try not to have too many joins on the batting because it tends to start getting wavy but one or two joins tends to make something large enough to use for cot sized quilts.  I bought lots of  these panels at Big W for $10.  They include a panel for the top and fabric for the backing, although that backing fabric tends to be too small so I have to enlarge it.  But what a bargain!

Here's that particular panel made up.  I finished this one sometime last year.

If the scraps are too small to join I use them for Memory quilts.  Usually I'll have enough backing fabric on the quilt frame after quilting a larger quilt to back the baby quilts and I'll simply lay the small scraps of batting on top.  It saves wondering what to do with backing scraps and I only have to pin the backing on once.

So far I've joined enough scraps to make three cot sized panel quilts and I've thrown out one of my disintegrating laundry bags!

Tweaked Rugby Stars

 After cutting my fabrics I stitched one block together to make sure I'd cut all the pieces correctly and to see what it looked like before I take it to retreat. It's so cute!  The block measures 16 1/2 inches I believe.

I'm sewing the scraps of the flying geese together as I go to make half square triangles and I'll be sewing them together as a leader ender project.  The smallest pinwheel block measures 3 inches and the other is 7 inches.  I'll end up with 32 pinwheels of each size.  I don't know what I'll do with them yet but I make a lot of memory quilts for still born babies so I expect they'll be used wisely.

I'm busy drawing all my diagonal lines on the fabric squares so that when I go to retreat I can just sew, sew, sew!

My next project is a secret gift for my firstborn son's girlfriend.  I have an idea in mind but I'm not terribly artistic so who knows how it'll go.  Erin is a dancer and I want to make her a picture from one of her dance poses.

I went to PBNify.com and turned Erin's picture into a paint by numbers picture.  You can click on as many or as few points in your photograph to get the look you're after.  I wanted it to be fairly simple because I want to embroider the details over the top of the painting.  I won't be painting the background.  I'm not an artist either so fingers crossed it goes well!

Here's the picture with the numbers.  It's very faint but I think you'd see it clearer if you click on the pic.

I then went to goart.fotor.com to turn my photo into artwork.  I chose the Favism option because it had lots of clear lines that I'll be able to embroider.

Now I've got to work out how to put the two together.  I hope it works out as well as it does inside my head!

The Book of Shame

I've been pretty good at finishing things for a while and, because of Covid, I haven't really been buying much so if anyone had asked me how many projects I have to do I'd have replied not many and gloated while everyone around me gasped in horror because they have a billion things to make. Then I decided to clean my studio.  Oh dear.  As I tidied and sorted I took pictures of my projects and once printed stuck them into this book.

The book of shame.  

Said in an ironic manner, of course, because it's kind of exciting to have all these things to do!

I haven't counted all the projects, kits, fabrics, patterns, UFOs etc but I did number the ones I wanted to concentrate on working on first and those numbered 35.  THIRTY FIVE PROJECTS!  Kate suggested I randomly choose the next project I work on and I randomly chose number 11.  The fabrics are fat quarter bundles from Aldi.  They aren't the best quality fabrics but they're pretty!  I decided to make Rugby Stars from the book A Cut Above by Gerri Robinson.  There are some lovely quilts in this book!

As I have a tendency to do, before I started cutting I changed my mind about the design and my quilt will just be a 4 x 4 star layout.  The only thing I don't like about this book, and some others, is that they'll say fat quarter friendly or scrap friendly or something and then not give you a cutting layout to make the most of your fat quarter or just tell you to cut out of assorted fabrics without giving amounts.  I don't have many scraps so I need to know how much fabric to buy. Here are my fabrics.  I swapped out the stripe for a plain yellow because I couldn't deal with matching stripes!  I'll find a use for the stripe in another project, I'm sure.  After all, I have quite a few of them!

Here they are all cut out!  

I plan on taking them to retreat to sew in a couple of weeks so I'll have to come up with another project from my book of shame to start working on.

 

Rainbow Bargello

My family lives in the UK and for many years I’ve been lucky enough to receive money for Christmas and birthday gifts which I’ve spent on fabric to make quilts.  Last Christmas I used my money from my mother in law to buy rainbow fabric jelly rolls from Connecting Threads after I was inspired by a rainbow bargello quilt by Let’s Quilt Something.  I particularly liked the method used to sew it and that it was promoted as a quick quilt top to sew.

I started this quilt in early March.  You sew all the jelly roll strips together to form a tube and then you slice the tube into strips of varying widths and sew them all back together again.  Easy Peasy, right? Ha! I tried that method but nothing was going right and it was incredibly frustrating!  I worked out that one of the problems was that my jelly roll strips didn’t all measure the same 2 1/2 inch width and that, coupled with probably not the most accurate sewing, made my strips wonky and then they just refused to line up with each other.  As you can see from the next picture the quilt was just getting wonkier and wonkier.

So there was no other option but to unpick it all!

I trimmed all the jelly roll strips so they were all the same widths and cut them into individual blocks and sewed them one at a time.  Needless to say, this was turning into not such a quick quilt to make! The other change I made was to sew short strips into chunks rather than in lines and this kept the quilt nice and straight and flat.  It took ages but I was much happier with the result.

So the quilt top that should have taken a weekend took almost four months haha!  But I’d also injured my hand during this time so that didn’t help at all. 

I used up some of the leftover jelly roll strips to make binding.  I didn’t want one solid colour so I’m echoing the blocks on the outer edge.

I’m not going to quilt this right away so it’s been put away in my box storage system.  Aren’t these gift boxes pretty?!

Now, what do I make next?

Daunting blank page

 Starting a blog seemed like a great idea until I was faced with this empty page that I’m supposed to fill with interesting things! And I thought that choosing a blog name was going to be the hardest part.  I want to thank my friends Judy, Kate and Kay for trying to help me come up with a name but, as they will see, I ignored all of their suggestions.  As Judy pointed out I’d end up with a lot of weirdos reading the blog if I’d gone ahead with any of them!

So a bit about me.  I’m Evelyn and I’m a Welsh lady living in Australia where a lot of brilliantly talented quilt designers live.  I’m not one of them!  But I do enjoy creating quilts.  I like most of the process except for cutting fabrics, piecing, pressing, unpicking, pressing, quilting, binding and labelling.  I am quite good at unpicking though as I’ve had plenty of practice!  My absolute favourite part is the completed project.  Once that is spread on my bed, gifted or whatever I soon forget how tedious the rest of the process has been.  I am exaggerating, of course, but sewing can be very monotonous!

I started quilting in 1993, when I was 20, after my mum asked me to drive her to a quilting class.  I didn’t want to wait around in the car for her so I joined too.  We started by learning how to make one block with cardboard templates and curtain fabric.  After our first block, I realised that if you can make one block you can make two, then three and then a whole quilt!  I discovered the meaning of life!  So we quit classes and got to work on our quilts.

Here’s my first quilt after it was repaired a couple of years ago.

I wanted to start a blog to document my quilts and other projects past, present and, with any luck, future. So let’s see how I do!

And if you’re wondering why I chose Jelly Belly Bean out of all the names I could have come up with?  It’s because when I was little and just learning the alphabet I’d sing “a b c d e f g h i j k jelly belly bean” and that’s the nickname I was given from then on.  

First post done.  That wasn’t so scary now was it?