Marsala - Colour of the Year

I wasn't immediately inspired by this year's Pantone Colour of the Year but I started a Pinterest Board and slowly found some inspiration. I was especially inspired by African textiles including bark and mud cloth. I like the black, white and Marsala-ish red/brown together. I sketched out my ideas and decided to make a sort of sampler quilt, challenging myself to work out how to make a variety of different designs.

I looked in my stash and started adding a bit of Marsala to my shopping basket if I saw it on sale. I ended up with a fat quarter from Allison Glasses Field Day, a fat quarter of Flight Canvas in Paprika, a skinny quarter of a Parson Gray print and my personal closest-to-Marsala fabric was a 1/2 yard from Oakshotts Lyon collection. I added 4 fat quarters of Marsala-ish Kona, some Kona Bone and a few metres of black Ditte fabric from Ikea.

I made two items for the Colour of the Year Quilt contest, a quilt and matching cushion. Except I ran out of time so it's a Top and matching cushion! The top measures 76"x58", it's the biggest quilt I've made so far.

I used a mix of different piecing techniques and really pushed myself!

The cushion has the same feathers that run down the left of the quilt. It's 20"x20" with the binding making the space for the cushion slightly smaller.

I tried out hand quilting for the first time to really emphasise the fletching section, I'm really happy with how it turned out!

Thanks for looking, I really enjoyed making these!

Ice Parfait Mosaics

These are my fabric mosaics for the contest over at Stitched in Color. (Missing out the 'u' hurts me by the way!)

I adored the top inspiration image and created my first mosaic in homage:

My second mosaic is inspired by glacial ice:

Folksy Fabric Mosaics

Stitched in Color periodically runs fun fabric mosaic contests on her blog. This one is sponsored by the Intrepid Thread. I've created two different mosaics with my interpretation of the Folksy Fall theme.

This is my Folksy Autumn mosaic, maybe not enough colour variation but I love a colour gradient!

My second mosaic is my personal favourite. I based it around the colours in the two central fabrics and like to think of it as my Folksy Navy mosaic.

I love making mosaics for these contests, it's shopping with no guilt!

My Underwater Castle Bag

I wanted to share a project I completed a few months ago. I made it using the Underwater Stripes pattern by Sew Sweetness. This bag was my first proper bag with a zipper and has inspired me to make more since!

I was using scraps from another project and had enough diagonal pieced strips left to make the handles from those rather than HST's, it worked well and was much quicker! I rearranged the HST panels into my own design, giving a sort of 'Castle' shape. In order for my design to work I needed an even number in the panels so I sewed my HST's together with a scanty seam allowance and made my bag slightly narrower so I could get away with 6 HST's wide instead of 7. An unintended consequence of my scanty seams was that my pattern pieces also ended up fitting on 4 HST's high instead of 5.

Here's the other side, they don't match as I was using up the scraps I had on hand!

I am most proud of my zipper, I hadn't really used any before so this was an adventure. The instructions in the pattern were clear and helpful, it didn't turn out perfectly but I love it!

I used a leftover piece of grey linen for the lining with a pop of colour in the pocket lining.

I would certainly recommend this pattern as a great first bag pattern, especially if you're already a quilter. I'm certain it would look great with plain fabric instead of a the HST's as well, it has a lovely shape to it. The best thing about the pattern? It's free!

Tessellation Quilt

Well it's 11:30pm and I have just finished the Top of my Tessellation quilt. I participated in the SAL for the pattern by Allison Glass that was organised by Sara at Sew Sweetness. 

I really loved the pattern but my favourite bit was the star. Therefore I decided to rearrange the triangles to make more pretty shapes!

I apologise for the quality of the picture but I just finished and the deadline for the SAL is in less than 6 hours.

Time for bed!

WIP Wednesday

Hiya

I have been a little bit of a failure in updating this blog but I have been getting a little sewing done.

My Acacia star duvet cover has stalled at the complete top stage:

However I have been working hard on using my scraps to make some coordinating pillows. I have 

made Half Square Triangles out of some of the Acacia prints then appliquéd them onto the existing 

black pillows that came with the ikea duvet set I bought. I believe the technique I used is raw edge appliqué? At any rate I ironed them onto bondaweb, trimmed them to 2" square, ironed them onto the pillows then stitched around the edge. I ended up using my buttonhole stitch and going round twice to get the effect I wanted, I'm quite pleased with it in the end.

Well it would be more accurate to say I'm quite pleased with my one completed pillowcase out of four! The others are sitting on a pile on my ironing board waiting to have the HSTs ironed on.

I'm linking up with freshly pieced

WIP Wednesday

This week I've been working on my Star Duvet cover. This is my design (that I did myself):

I've been making it using a 20 fat eighths from Acacia by Tula Pink and a black Ikea double duvet cover. I cut out the centre of the duvet and I intend to reinsert the patchwork, we'll see how well that works later on!

I've made my blocks and joined them into columns, looking good so far!

Now I need to join up my columns, then see how flat it is. I'm linking up with WIP Wednesday at Freshly Pieced.