Bloggers Quilt Festival fall 2010 entry.

I had to think a bit about what I felt like entering into my first ever Bloggers Quilt Festival. Officially, my favourite quilt I've ever made is my Mingle Wonky Mini Quilt. But I looked through everyone else's, and my favourites were all spectral/rainbow ones. That make it a whole lot easier to pick one to showcase. This isn't the kind of thing I would normally do, but, if I'm honest, once upon a time, neither was quilting. I came to it via laptop sleeves, which I came at from laptop bags, and it's all a bit by accident that I'm now a quilter.

After putting in stupid huge amounts of effort to sew foam padded laptop bags with zips and pockets and handles and all sorts of fancy things, I realised that really, all you needed was a regular bag to put all your extra bits in and then a lightly padded sleeve for the laptop itself. I started sewing straight strips together to make the sleeves look pretty, but I didn't bother with super accurate cutting, or ironing the seams, or any fancy stuff like that. They were rarely more than 40 cm wide, so accuracy wasn't hugely important. But I was willing to admit, the straighter I cut, the smoother it was, and the nicer it looked.

So, one day, for no reason other than an excess of money, I bought a rotary cutter. One of the $10 ones from Spotlight, because I didn't take it seriously enough to get one of the expensive ones. All their cutting mats were in inches though, so I got an A4 sized one for $3 from Cheap as Chips. I set about cutting all my fat quarters into 10cm squares, that I could then reassemble into the outsides of laptop sleeves*.

The next Monday, I found out that Spotlight were having a quilt show/competition on Thursday. I decided, that since I had all these lovely 10cm squares cut up, I would make a quilt. Only a little one, since I only had 4 days, and I was new to this whole thing, but hey. A real quilt.

I had a top pieced by mid Wednesday, so I went in to get batting and backing. I got wool, since that's what I was using for the laptop sleeves, and I got full width, since I could cut the edge off for a few more sleeves. Then, I found out that actually, it was next Thursday.

Damn. 20+ hours of sewing in two days wasn't a necessary as I had thought. Mum said I should make it bigger, so I decided I'd fill out the whole batting. I had run out of some of my fabrics though, but I got some more, and chopped up old part-done projects as well. That's why there's some fabrics that are only at one end.

Technique-wise, it's a bit shoddy. The border/binding is just the backing folded round, so the in the ditch quilting, which sometimes is aside the ditch quilting, isn't set in at the ends, and I used a different colour cotton for the top and the bottom, so it shows through on the back occasionally. There's a lot of squares that now I think I should switch and, despite the fact that they're different kinds and qualities of fabrics, I didn't prewash them (because they were never intended for a quilt) so now I'm scared to get it dirty. It's on my bed, with other quilts on top of it, but in the morning before I make my bed, I can see all these little rainbow patches in the gaps between them.

When I move out of my parents house, into a place with walls big enough to hang a single bed quilt, I'll probably feature it on a wall, but for now, I like it like it is, a secret rainbow quilt just for me.

*I haven't made a laptop sleeve since.

The quilts so far...

I just went through and re-tagged a heap of posts, since I stopped putting quilt numbers at around #6.

#1 is the big rainbow quilt.

#2 is Maddy's quilt.

#3 is Levi's (friend from work's baby) quilt.

#4 will be Mama Jan's quilt, which got a number when it was in planning stages - that's how long it's been on the gunna list.

#5 is the retro quilt

#6 is the BlueGreen quilt

#7 is the purple quilt (not yet completed)

#8 is Esther's quilt

#9 is Dad's quilt cover (quilted, but not assembled)

#10 is my wonky Mingle mini quilt.

#11 is what came to be known as the Bubble and Squeak mini quilt (which has also gone to live with Esther, not that it will ever get used because I tied a bow around it in matching fabric and Helen thinks it's too pretty to unwrap)

#12 is the Honeycomb quilt I finished today.

Now I need a way to put that somewhere I can remember it - on the sidewall or something.

An ode to the classics...

I've put the Retro and BlueGreen quilts in the wash so that they're nice and clean to take into Spotlight tomorrow, as well as the pretty little new one, so for the first time in ages I can see my first quilt again. I'd forgotten how pretty and bright and rainbow it is, and how well most of the corners match up, and how good my in-the-ditch was, especially considering that it was my first and that I did it in 10 days, or more specifically nights. Yes the smaller ones may look more conventionally quilt-y but the rainbow one is, and always will be, so very me. But I didn't pre-wash any of it, so it cant go on the top of the bed where it will get all dirtied by the cats, and so I don't get to admire it as often as I should. Maybe when I do my room re-organise next week I'll try and work out a way to fit it up on the wall instead.

I have to go to work now. Only a short one, thankfully, and then I get 2 days off before the weekend, so it's not all bad.

The Sale Dilema...

Lincraft is having a 30% off sale for the next few days, meaning it's only going to be $16.10 for a pre-cut cot size bamboo cotton quilt batt. The thing is, do I go mental and buy up big, or do I think, maybe, or even probably, I will get bored with the whole quilting thing before I get around to using them, leaving them languishing in a tub for a few years, till the next cat to show up has a baby on them?

That sort of thing does tend to happen with me, because I think of myself as a "soft engineer" and I enjoy much more the process of figuring out the best way to make something, rather than the actual making. Once a design is worked out, sorted, easy to do, it becomes boring. Maybe that's why I wanted to do this blog, because I spend (waste) countless hours working out the best/easiest/quickest ways of making various things, then, once that is done, I make one or two to show people and move on. Usually leaving behind the dozen or so lots that I cut out to make, now that I had it sorted, as well as all the stuff I bought specially for them.

That said, I currently have 4 in progress projects that are about the right size...


The baby quilt (quilt#3) is now into its nine star-patterned blocks and will be made into one big bit tomorrow, and hopefully, basted and quilted immediately after.


Mama Jan's quilt (quilt#4) will be made that size, because my sister was quite blasè with regards to directions, and that is my biggest hate as a crafter, so she will be punished with a 120by150 quilt no matter what size she was expecting.


The retro quilt (quilt#5) is officially sized at 120x160cm, but I can shave a bit off of that without much hassle.


The PinkGreenBrown quilt has no number, because I'm still a bit nervous about it and its triangles... its official size according to the paint document I've been using to try and get my math sorted out is 136cm square, so I'll be holding off on that one.

The rainbow pastels quilt also has no number, but it might get bumped up and end up being a decimal placed number, because its one that's all squares, and totally for me. It's pretty much going to be a pastel coloured copy of quilt#1, which looks like this...


And which is way bigger than it looks in this picture - its actually big enough across for my queen sized bed, even if it is a little short on the up-down way, by about 3 rows. Each of those squares is a bit over 8cm, if you want some idea of scale. That one however was done completely randomly, and there are some fabrics only in there once, or only in there on the far right side (because it was originally going to be square, and made in 4 days for a competition - when I found out is was not that thursday but the next thursday, giving me an extra 7 days to do it in, it was increased.)

The pastel rainbow quilt though has been specially bought for, and as a result I have, for the most part, about 20 squares of each colour, so I could do it a bit more uniformly, although I cant help but think that that would kind of ruin it. So I'm gunna wait on that one for now. Also, since I already have about 350 squares for it, and the maximum number of squares for a cot sized precut is 270, I'd probably be doing it on off-the-bolt wadding.

Nonetheless, that's still 3 precuts that are pretty much definite, well, 2 that are definite and one that is highly likely, and since maddy's quilt (quilt#2) was done on a precut, and I really like that size for a casual couch blankie, I'm thinking I'll probably be aiming my sizing math at that it in the future too. But does that justify buying 9 or 10 or them? Should I just get 5 or 6 and maybe buy some meterage as well? It's the same price for a metre of the 2.2 wide stuff as it is for the precut, but for just one big bit, say, possible pastel quilt sized (1.8x2.2) its $30, and that seems so much more expensive, even though, by square metre, its about the same.

I've allowed myself $160 to stock up, which is either 10 precuts or 6 precuts and 1.8 meters off the bolt... I guess I'll decide when I get there.