Thursday 23 January 2014

Studio Tekturek pages on Scrap365


I have two scrapbook pages on the Scrap365 blog today using some lovely patterned papers from Studio Tekturek. This is one of them, why not pop over to Scrap365 to see the other one...

Monday 20 January 2014

A carry everything craft bag


Woohoo! My craft bag takes pride of place on the front cover of the month's Sewing World.

Friday 17 January 2014

Ten little rubber ducks quilt


Another cot quilt from me and this one was very over due for a baby born last summer but I was pleased to get it done before Christmas. I made a Hungry Caterpillar quilt for the baby's big brother and so I was excited to find more fabric based on illustrations from other Eric Carle books. However the other ranges don't seem to be available in the UK and so I bought this fabric from the States via a seller on Etsy.

This quilt is made from 3 different fabrics. The animal panels were on one fabric, the mother duck and ducklings and the numbered duck outlines were on another and then there was the lovely ducks on the water fabric around the border.

It was a fairly simple quilt to put together with squares and rectangles. I did some free machine embroidery in wavy lines on the white panels and I really like how this turned out.


I also quilted around each of the animals and each duck. I wasn't looking forward to quilting the octopus with all his wavy legs, but he turned out to be my favourite panel at the end. The quilting really brought him to life!



Tuesday 14 January 2014

A Sizzix tumbler block quilt


 A friend of mine recently had a baby girl and I wanted to make her a cot quilt. Before she was born I started to make one using Dr Seuss fabric but when I saw the photo online of such a beautiful baby girl (with a very pretty name) I felt like I wanted to make something much more girly.  I have a few quilt dies for my Sizzix Bigshot, in fact it's the reason I bought the Bigshot in the first place so I could use it for quilts as well as papercrafts. I got out my tumbler block die and the Bigshot machine with a selection of girly fabrics and away we went. My daughter even helped by winding the handle on the machine.

This is probably the quickest quilt I have ever made as I started cutting it out at 11.30 in the morning and I was quilting it at 10 in the evening. The shape of the tumbler die makes the quilt look far more complicated than it really was. I only bought this die originally because it was on special offer but now I love it.

I googled three butterfly outlines which I traced onto Bondaweb and used to add the applique shapes.


I did simple quilting in the ditch with a little free machine stitching around the butterflies. I went around the butterflies three times as I've found that if the stitching line is wobbly but repeated a few times it looks like you've done it on purpose!

I really enjoyed putting together this quilt and I will definitely be making more Sizzix quilts. Cutting out accurate pieces has never been my strong point but this machine solves that.