New Jelly Roll sets and Rainbow Rings progress

In more preparations for this year's Festival of Quilts in August, I've been creating some gorgeous new fabric strip sets, and have even managed to upload them into the Sewmotion online shop! I am feeling pretty productive this week haha!

These collections are all from Makower and include Sky Blue and Sequoia, both designed by Edyta Sitar, Sundance by Beth Studley and finally Makower's brand new collection, Bloom, which I have to say is my new favourite - those teeny weeny florals are so cute!

These sets contain forty 2.5" strips, four in each of the ten fabrics included in each set.  I think these are my favourite pre-cut as they are so versatile, if you need inspiration, why not check out my Pre-Cut Party PDF patterns. What's more, if you subscribe to the Sewmotion Newsletter, you can get 10% off these sets over the next week.

Meanwhile, when not cutting I've been working hard on my Rainbow Rings quilt, my latest mammoth curved EPP, hand appliqué and quilting project, and it's coming along nicely - although this weather isn't the best to be sat under a full size quilt! Now I've hand sewn the four rings onto the dark grey background, I'm now hand quilting around each of the segments using an Aurifil 12wt cotton.

Wishing everyone and happy sewing week!

Linking up with Let's Bee Social, Midweek Makers and Needle & Thread Thursday

Something To Replace The Missing Sun

Where did the sunshine go?!?! Just when I thought it was springtime… ah well, maybe another dose of colourful butterflies and cute daisies will cheer us up. As you can see below, I’ve been busy playing with my Sea Holly and Kona fabrics – I do love how these blend with my greys and yellow.

My first project with these gorgeous fabrics is a new Beginner’s Quilt to add to the collection, I’m just waiting on a bright day to take some decent shots for the kit, but this will be available soon.

Then I made a jelly roll or two, you know how I love a stream of colour, and these are no exceptions - the Sea Holly Strip Set includes four prints from this Michael Miller range, which blend so well with Kona’s Graphite, Tomato and Banana. 

And I just had to play with some of my new Kona Solids to create this gorgeous Purple Haze Strip Set, for true lovers of ‘the purple’! And doesn’t that graphite work so well again?

Both of these stripper sets contain twenty 2½” x 44” cotton strips, which together with a base colour such as white or a pale cream, you could come up with so many designs. Why not start with our free All Squared Up pattern? I've worked out some layout possibilities below... With this simple piecing, and then maybe some straight-line quilting, you could make a gorgeous modern and fresh quilt, ideal for a wedding gift, or a treat for yourself.

 

Just a little note about these variations: as you have seven different designs in these fabric rolls and not eight as in the pattern, your cutting will be slightly different. As in the pattern, take two strips of each colour, and make eight blocks from each - you will get 56 blocks in all. To make up the remaining eight blocks, take two extra strips from the strip set and make 4 blocks in each design, two positive, two negative to make up to 64 blocks.

I hope I have inspired you to indulge in some fun with colour, as always, I'm linking up with Lorna's Let's Bee Social over at Sew Fresh Quilts, and Needle And Thread Thursday over on My Quilt Infatuation - come and say hello!

Sunday Stash #12

It feels like I haven’t added to my stash for ages, so when I had a hit of inspiration for a new quilt kit, I just had to go on a fabric hunt… which of course ended at Doughty’s! I bought a some of these Riley Blake prints back at Festival in August, and found that a couple of my Konas matched perfectly with this Fancy Free range. 

One of my many grand plans has always been to bring out a collection of pre-cut fabric sets, with quilt kits to go with them. I decided to go back to my Beginner’s Quilt and made this cute and very girly version, and then developed a kit designed to encourage and help those new to quilting. 

Each kit will contain 36 6½” squares, the border and binding strips to make the top, plus grey Aurifil thread for the piecing, and full instructions with links to the photographic free tutorial on sewmotion.com. These will be available in my shops very soon.

My Stripper sets are now available to buy in my Folksy and Etsy shops, where you have a choice of Rainbow, Hot and Cool colourways. 

Each set contains twenty 2½” x 44” strips in Kona Solids. Add some white or a soft grey as a base colour and you can make so many different designs, including my All Squared Up and my Fox in the Nine Patch quilts.

I’m also very excited to announce that I will be at Stockton’s Sparkles Christmas Market this year. I’ve not attended this event before, but looking at pictures from last year, and talking to other local small business owners, it sounds like a great four-day market with 30 log cabins for us independent sellers, plus Christmas lights, carols and hopefully mulled wine to get us all in the Christmas spirit. This festive fun will be in Stockton’s lovely redeveloped town centre from 26^th to 29^th November.

As you can imagine, the next couple of months are going to be very busy building up stock for a four-day market… eek!! A couple of other new products I’ve been working on are these two cushions. Inspired by Sew Fresh Quilt’s Dog Gone Cute QAL, I designed these using the stitch & flip method. They take a while to make but I’m really pleased with them, Parmo (a Middlesbrough food ‘delicacy’) and the phrase T-T-Teessider are both unique to my local area, but I’m thinking I could adapt these to all manner of phrases… when I find the time.

  

Before the ‘mass production’ starts, I’m looking forward to running another workshop for Doughty’s next weekend. This time we’re doing my Snowballs in Spring quilt, can’t wait to meet my quilters and have some fun!

A friend is holding a Macmillan coffee morning next weekend, which I’m sad to be missing, but I have managed to make a quilt for her to auction off - sometimes I just love my stash! Hopefully she’ll be able to raise a bit for a very worthwhile cause, which let’s face it, most of us sadly have reason to know about these days.

For more quilting fun and inspiration from around the world, pop over to Molli Sparkles’ Sunday Stash – I’ll see you there.