I have been asked by a dear friend to make a couple of
quilts for her newly refurnished sitting room, and when these lovely fabrics
from Lewis & Irene arrived in the post I was over the moon. This range is
called Honey Meadow and I just love the soft blues and browns, and the little
honeybee is so sweet! I was sent varying amounts from the range as well as a
jelly roll, the rest was left to my imagination! I must say, it really was a
lovely compliment to be trusted to come up with something she would like, and
believe me, this lady knows her quilts!!
So trying not to feel the pressure… I had a play around with
the fabrics for a few days, and soon enough an idea emerged from the back of my
mind where I keep my extensive “to-do, must-try, new challenge” list – a Lone
Star! I have loved this quilt design ever since I discovered quilting, but way
back then it involved English paper piecing and many many diamonds. However,
now strip piecing is all the rage, it sooo much easier!
As you may have gathered by now, I’m not a fan of making
things easy for myself by
following someone else’s pattern, I would much rather
work it out for myself. I have to admit I do like the odd bit of maths, and I
love geometry… they do say its good for the brain, don’t they. Anyway, I drew
out my diamond shapes, checking that the angle was correct for the second large
diamond, then worked out how many smaller diamonds I would need from each 2½”
strip.
Once I got my head around matching the seams by slightly
offsetting the pieced rows, the large diamonds came together quite quickly, I
then referred back to my drawing to work out the size of the solid triangles I
needed for the corners and sides. I pieced the Star in quarters, then halves, then
into one whole. For the border I chose a simple mitred strip in blue which I
think frames the star very nicely.
For the second quilt, I decided to try yet another block on
my to-do list, the Granny Square. I’ve seen this a lot on Pinterest lately and
believe its inspired by the crochet granny squares used to make those beautiful
blankets.
I separated the remaining 2½” strips into lights and darks,
then decided to have four different designs, one with a brown centre cross, one
with a brown outer ring, one with a blue centre cross, and the other with a blue
outer ring. I then laid these out in diagonals. At first glance this quilt does
look quite scrappy, but there actually is a pattern there. Once I had trimmed
down my blocks into squares, I added sashing strips, then a simple border.
Now the quilting… I am quite proud of my quilting here, and
it’s all down to an inspiring lady I may have mentioned before, Angela Walters
from Quilting Is My Therapy. If you
remember I attended two of her lectures on
free-motion quilting at QuiltCon, and bought her book, Shape by Shape, which as
you can see, came in very handy indeed.
I decided to do some parallel quilting on my Lone Star,
turning direction by 45degrees in each star point. I then worked on the
negative space by marking out these on-point squares in each corner, then
filling in with four triangles. I then filled these shapes with swirls and
figures-of-eight.
I quilted a loose meander in the other triangles, together
with a wavy design in the border. I wanted to keep this quilting quite loose as
the lines on the star are quite intense make the quilt a little stiff – not
very cuddly for snoozing on the sofa!
I also used this shape-by-shape technique in the Granny
Squares quilt by keeping within each block and adding some orange peel shapes
on point, then filling the outer space with back and forth lines, and the inner
ring with dense clamshells. This again made these parts quite stiff, so I chose
to quilt simple lines in the sashing and borders to loosen the quilt up.
These quilts have given my machine and my shoulders a really
great workout, and I can’t wait for more… but that’s another post!
I do hope you like my quilts and this post, if you have any
comments or questions, please post them below. I would love to hear from you
and promise to reply as soon as I can.