quilt Archives -

Quilt for Auction

August 2, 2010 by Tsoniki 1 Comment

This spring my Mom mentioned she might like to make a quilt for the NWIC T’laneq – which roughly translates to A Celebration. It’s an annual fundraising event the college puts on, inviting several dozen supporters. They ask for donations for a silent auction as well as a live auction, which is held during the dinner.

Preparing stencil of spindlewhorl owl

My Mom asked Stan Green, a local artist who designed a spindlewhorl owl for the college’s use, if she and I could use the design in a quilt. He very generously said yes. Several steps went into creating the design for the quilt: getting a large print of the owl, copying it to freezer paper, ironed freezer paper to material and cut out pieces we were going to sew down. Once we got to sewing, we both had to work on just this piece over a few days. It took an hour just to go around the circle!

Before we did the center applique, we worked on the border blocks. You can’t tell in the final pictures, but the center of the blocks is made up of one inch squares – I sewed six strips of brown together, cut into 1 1/2 inch strips, then resewed them together. They ended up looking like a square of basket weaving.

One thing the pictures does not show are the stars we sewed in the center of the four green corner squares. All in all it took about 60-70 hours to complete, and went for $1000 at the live auction. We are very proud of the work that we did and were so happy it raised such a large amount of money for the college!

Finished quilt “The Grandfather”

Secret Project Update

March 25, 2009 by Tsoniki 2 Comments

A couple of weeks ago I would have said that if you walked into the house you would instantly know what the secret projects we’ve been working on are and that amazingly enough my husband didn’t realize. Well call me naive because he finally confessed that he’s known all along! He didn’t know how big the project was (I did tell him after he said what he knew) and he promised not to tell anyone else.

So for the updates! K is almost done with hers – two more small steps and she’s finished. L is almost done with hers, she will be done soon though. I’m just about done with one I am making and not nearly as close to being done with another. C came by last week and we made one while she was here and she’s making another at her own house. I have been taking pictures along the way and will share them once we are finished!

We even had my Mom and K’s Mom in on the fun! We figured out who is getting what but still aren’t sure when the giving will happen. For sure it will be by the time I leave, which is coming up very soon.

In other craft news, Shannon and I took a quilt class a couple of weeks ago! It was called Flowing Ribbons and even though I messed up a section of my material, I still really like the pattern. I love the fabrics I picked out! I still need to sew together strips to make another piece of fabric but that will be later – after the secret projects and finished, but really more like after I’m settled somewhere.

Here are some pictures:

ribbonsquiltclass

This is my quilt. The class teacher had many design boards (pieces of fleece) hung up so each of us could lay our fabric out to see what it would end up looking like. I had more pieces up but they kept falling down. I took a picture because the point of the class was to learn how to sew the curves! So I wanted to make sure I remembered how I wanted it to look (a great tip I am going to remember from now on – take pictures!). This is a project I am either going to make sure it with me while we are traveling (more on that soon!) or have it in a box to be delivered to the house vs the storage unit.

shannonquiltclass

Here is Shannon working on a curve with her awesome Janome machine!

Horse Baby Blanket

January 6, 2009 by Tsoniki 2 Comments

I finished my newest nephews baby blanket! Okay I finished the other day and had to tear it out. I know that knitters do the whole tearing out thing, but as a seamstress or quilter, rarely have I!

It didn’t take very long to get the top put together and when I realized I had batting, the entire thing was basted in minutes thanks to my friend’s new Janome sewing machine. She has a tacking (or maybe the machine calls it tying?) function and we did it in really, three minutes or so. Super fast. All I had left to was the binding, and considering this was a couple of weeks before Christmas I put it on the side. The blanket wasn’t a Christmas gift, but rather a welcome to the family gift. He was born at the beginning of October so I’m within baby gifting time.

This is the first blanket where I used the sewing machine to sew on the binding completely. I’m not happy with it at all! Maybe it’s because the binding is silk but it didn’t look nearly as clean as I want it to. I used a zig zag stitch and left a little edge – the front looked mostly good, there were a few areas here and there where the fabric didn’t move fast enough so the stitches are super close. The corners looked rough though. I didn’t think about how to do the corners before getting to that point, just did it. I tried to cover up the corner with a design – which wasn’t aligned, I am thinking it’s because of the silk. I’m definitely practicing on scrap fabric before I do that again! The back didn’t look that great at all. I’m definitely more unhappy with the back.

Notice I’m talking in the past tense? Yeah that’s because I tore the binding off. It looked that bad. And I would show you pictures but my camera batteries died. We did buy rechargables and a charger and of course with all the video game playing that’s been going on, those are in need of a charge. I will show pictures when I get it redone because it is very cute.

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