A little gift for a friend

It's one of my Patchwork friend's birthday just before Christmas so on Saturday I made her a little patchwork needlebook to go with some other sewing goodies.

I have made a few of these needlebooks for other friends and my sister and all have been well received.  The pattern is from a tutorial I saw ages ago on nanacompany's blog.

I have a Needlebook "Project Pack" to hand with my sewing supplies which contains everything I need for these needlebooks: suitable scraps of fabric, narrow ribbon, 1.5" squares, red and green fabrics for the strawberry, matching embroidery floss, instructions, strawberry template, white felt for the 'Pages' etc.  Scraps of batting are also in a handy pile.

So when I want to make one as a little gift I can just grab the pack and get started.

I like to use Perle cotton for the hand stitching and I have a large sweet jar full of them.  A few years ago I passed a sweet shop which was giving away the empty sweet jars so I took one.  Ideal for my Perle cottons and as its made from clear plastic I can see inside to check if I have the colours I need.

So here's the one I made for my dear friend:

An appliqued strawberry on the front and the back is made from a patchwork of 1.5" squares.

Now a little visit to a re-opened sewing supplies shop in town so I can choose some useful goodies to go with it!


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Giveaway

Just letting you know of a Giveaway now taking place on Lily's Quilts.
It's for 20FQs, a Giveaway offered by Polka Dot Tea.
Some lovely fabrics on this site.

More Freckles stats

Adding to my previous post, a few more Freckles stats:

• To date I have made 6 Freckles Quilts, based on the lovely design in Emily Cier's book Scrap Republic.
• 5 of them are I Spy quilt
• 1 (the first I made) is exactly how Emily describes in her book, which I called

 

Rainbow Freckles Quilt:

This one is in Mauritius.

• My I Spy Blue Freckles Quilt is the 2nd I Spy Freckles Quilt I have made this year.

Thank you, Emily for a great quilt design.  I love all the handwork involved: blanket stitching around the Freckles and hand quilting around them.  Nice to do at Patchwork meetings and whilst watching television.

14th Quilt finished this year

I sewed the binding on to my I Spy Blue Freckles quilt yesterday which makes it the 14th Quilt I have completed so far this year. I am so pleased at this total, especially as 4 of them were UFOs.

Here's my finished quilt:

 

My New Year Resolution was to use up some of my stash and scraps and that really happened with this quilt.

 

• All the 'Freckles" were cut from fabrics in my stash, some have been there for a long time, many of them used in other Freckles Quilts or other child/baby quilts.
• The backing is from a piece I bought several years ago from Spotlight in New Zealand.  It was a bargain and I bought 3 yards to use as backing.  Up until this quilt I have always felt it wasn't quite the "right" fabric for the backing.  However, with this quilt I decided not to be so fussy:  it is a typical baby fabric and although it is a contrast to the front which has such bold colours I think it works.  Being paler shades it shows up the bright turquoise Perle cotton hand quilting very well.
• Again, using my principle of using up I looked in my bag of spare bits of binding, all left overs from various quilts I have made over the years.

This is quite an old photo of my bag of scrap bindings and several of these have already been used.
However, I found two lengths of spotted bindings (I love spotty bindings), one was a pale blue with white spots, the other a turquoise with yellow spots). When I sewed them together they went all around the quilt with about 8" to spare! Perfect. ............... Guess where the spare 8" is?

• The Perle Cotton was also from my stash, a bright turquoise variegated one.  Almost finished it on this quilt but a little left for a future small project.
• The batting was a leftover piece which, when I sorted out my stash cupboard earlier this year, I had measured and pinned on a label with the dimensions.  Very useful when I looked through my batting pieces and found this piece which was exactly the right size!
• Embroidery threads used for blanket stitching the Freckles were all from stash.

The only new fabric in this quilt is the blue background which I bought at the Festival of Quilts in August this year. About 6 GBP per metre.  Got a small bit left to use for framing Crumb blocks or using in a future Strip Quilt, perhaps.

So, a small baby quilt, it measures 30" square.  Ready for the next baby boy.  I know of three babies expected between December and mid April so perhaps this little Freckles quilt will find a home with one of them.

A Close up of some of the Freckles and stitching:

 

And, finally, the backing and hand quilting:

 

A few stats about my finished quilts so far this year:

• 14 finished quilts, 4 of them UFOs
• 8 of the 14 gifted so far: 4 are now in New Zealand, 1 in Germany and 3 here in the UK.

Isn't is lovely to have lots of scraps to use up, whether they are fabric, batting, embroidery threads, bindings or Perle Cotton!

Linking up with Clare's Maybush Studio Brit Linky Thursday blog.

 

 

Rainbow Strippy finished

I have finished my Rainbow Strippy Quilt this week and I love it.

It is based on the Beeline Quilt from Emily Cier's book Scrap Republic.
However, I have increased the size as the one in the book only finishes at 30" square.  That's a nice size for a playmat or pushchair/Moses basket quilt but this will be useful for a cot too.
I made the centre panel around 30" and the borders 5" or so and the bound quilt measures 38" wide by 42" long.

Every single part of this quilt was made from stash:  scrap strips (many of them given to me or ones I received in Swaps), the various colours of Perle Cottons, the batting, binding and also the quilt backing.  I bought this piece of fabric about three years ago and had never found it quite right for any quilt I was making.  Until this one and I decided it went really well. It was obviously meant for this quilt as the size was perfect!  I have just been left with the trimmings which have been added to my strips stash.  Nothing gets thrown away here!

It looks pretty and shows up the variously coloured rows of Perle quilting very nicely.

I added photos of the quilt yesterday onto my Flickr Photostream and added it to the Scrap Republic Group's photos.  As I have made several quilts from the book I now appear as No 1 on the list of most photos in this group.

During the week I have also made another little Preemie quilt top, similar to the one I showed in last week's blog post.  They are both sandwiched ready for quilting and I have started to hand quilt one of them.

I have also sandwiched the Freckles Quilt top I made a couple of months ago and this morning I started to hand quilt this one at my patchwork group. Again this is based on a Scrap Replublic pattern.

Hope you have all had a successful sewing week too.

Linking up with Maybush Studio's Thursday Brit Sewing Linky.