A Sizzix rainbow chevron quilt

I have been using my Sizzix Big Shot again to help me make a quilt and I absolutely love this one. I made it for a raffle at church as we are having a day for "Dress A Girl Around the World" ( a great charity helping to clothe some of the poorest children in the world) and so we wanted to raise money to buy fabric, elastic and bias binding. The great news is that we raised £165 through the quilt raffle. The quilt was so eye-catching that lots of people wanted to win it and , to be honest, I was a little sad to see it go (but I could always make another one!)

I found this tutorial for a chevron quilt which looks great. It uses strip piecing which would make this quilt even quicker to put together. However, my cutting out is always terrible (I even managed to make a wobbly Log Cabin square once) and so I put my quilt together using a Sizzix rectangle die (2" x 4" finished size). I found that 1 fat quarter can be cut into 24 rectangles but some of my fabric pieces were a little smaller than a fat quarter so my quilt is 22 rectangles wide. 

I started with a stack of rectangles and sewed 11 lilac rectangles to 11 red rectangles. Then I sewed the remaining 11 red rectangles to 11 yellow rectangles in pairs and continued like this through the stack of fabrics. I laid out the fabric pairs on the floor to create the chevron pattern like this.

Each diagonal row is then sewn together and looks like this.

Then the rows are sewn together like this.

Eventually the quilt top looks like this - so pretty!

I finished the quilt by quilting in the ditch along the zig zag rows which was really effective and used a turquoise fabric to bind the edges.

One of the problems I had with the original tutorial was that it didn't give the finished dimensions for the quilt. Then ,after I gave the quilt away, I realised I hadn't measured mine either! This quilt has 22 rectangles across the quilt and there are 23 rows. I think the finished quilt measured approximately 40" x 50".

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.

Brownies Toymaker Badge

At Brownies the girls have been working towards their Toymaker badge. We've had lots of fun working towards this.

The first thing we made was this toy owl. The girls loved making their owls! I cut out all the felt pieces using by Sizzix Big Shot and the Sizzix Bigz Die Owl #2 . This was a great way to cut out all the pieces quickly. The die does cut out circles where the eyes should go and so I had to layer up a few pieces of scrap felt over the die to make sure the big owl shapes didn't have two big holes in the middle.

All the owls were different colours with different colour button eyes. I sat with the girls in small groups (up to 8 girls at a time) to do the sewing. Some hadn't sewn anything before and so it was great to sit with them and encourage them to have a go. This toy also included sewing on buttons, which is a great skill to have.

The next toy we made was this Brownie board game. We found blank board games "paths" from Little Crafty Bugs which the girls customised with instructions. I printed out lots of instructions in squares and then the girls cut them out and stuck them down to make their unique game. The path was stuck down to some card with Brownie pictures around it and then laminated it.

We made our own game spinners with some downloaded hexagon backgrounds (from HERE) and some spinner arrows (from HERE). I also bought a big bag of counters and each game had 4 counters. We've got loads of counters left - perfect for a tiddlywinks championship!

Our last toy the girls made was shadow puppets. These were the easiest toys we made for the badges. I made these ones as examples and then we handed out black card, pencils and scissors and let the girls make whatever animals they liked. We made them around Chinese New Year and so I printed off some pictures of the Chinese Zodiac animals for inspiration. The girls needed a little help cutting out the holes to cover with tissue paper and then again to put in the paper fasteners (brads) so the puppets could move. But they were happy to use sticky tape to stick on their own bamboo skewers.

I made a screen with my silk painting screen and a piece of white polycotton fabric stretched tight across it with a desk lamp behind it.

For the girls who may have missed one of the activities above we also made pom pom rabbits for Easter!