Alhambra Star

This might be my longest ever work in progress. I first blogged about it in early 2015.  Just before Christmas I saw this Owen Jones canvas for sale in John Lewis:

I can do that, I thought.  So I started making another piece.

This one is based on a 3/4 inch equilateral triangle, chopped up in various ways.  The scale is rather small, but I have to keep it similar to the other pieces.



I think I may stop after this one and start joining up, but I'm not promising anything.

Circle in a square EPP

I'm calling this block circle in a square but its proper name is unknown to me.  I'm sure I didn't invent it!


I drew the pattern on to graph paper and numbered the pieces before cutting them out - that helps me to keep everything more of less lined up.




The fabrics are genuine vintage - they come from an amazing Australian online store called A Piece of Cloth and I believe they are sources from the USA.    So diffferent to work with - the colours are so vibrant.  Many of the fabrics were glazed so a bit hard to get the needle through - otherwise I had no problems .



At the moment I am hand quilting this - rather inexpertly - but practice makes perfect!

That EPP pattern

There's been a flurry of interest in the mini quilt I made last year so here is some more info about how I did it.

 

As you can see in the wire basket in the photo above, I cut my EPP papers out of a sheet of triangles downloaded from the incompetech website.  I think the edge of the triangle was 5/8 of an inch.  To be honest this was a bit small - you could go bigger.

The longer pieces are made up of a row of five triangles of the same size - you can see one of them in the tray to the left of the image above.  

The pattern depends on organising the fabrics into dark, medium and light.  Each small triangle has three of the longer pieces around it.  The dark, medium and light have to be in the right position for the 3D effect to work - I hope you can see that below.  






If you have any questions, please comment and I will try to answer.

Scrappy Liberty Log Cabin

I started making log cabins using my long Liberty Lawn scraps.  

I made no attempt to separate dark and light, and most of the blocks were totally random in terms of colour.  All I did in terms of planning was to avoid repeating any design within the block.

This one looked nicely yellow after the first round, so I stuck with it.  In the image above, its the one block that stands out.  In a good way or a bad way? I left it in anyway.

I ended up with 42 6 inch blocks which I put together 7 x 6 and its big enough for a cot / crib quilt.

It'm thinking about the best way to quilt it - it's so crazy and busy I don't want to add too much.

Linking up at She Can Quilt for Scraptastic Tuesday

Liberty Lawns and the Book

For some time now I have been keeping scraps of Liberty Lawn in a little book.  I love these detailed colourful prints and I like to remember the name of my favourites.  Recently I noticed that I had got to page 100 of my little book and the pages are fast running out.

It's surprising to think that all of these prints have come into my hands, one way or another, over the years.  

Now a decision has to be made.  What do I do when the pages run out?  Start volume 2?  Or bite the bullet and start again with a bigger book?

In the current book, the pieces have just been stuck in at random.  If I went for a new book, I could alphabetise them.  I have an old A to Z book which might be too big but it has great vintage appeal.  




I will do nothing for a while.  I like procrastinating and keeping all the options open.  Once a decision has been made you can't go back.