spring has come

After a few false starts the spring is finally here, so it's time for the Winter Stitching wrap-up.

These you've already seen finished in the previous Winter Stitching post:

1. Finish the Australian quilt.

2. Sew my first ever skirt.




3. Make a baby quilt for our friends' little boy.

4. Make a new quilt for my sister.

 These are still in progress:

5. Prepare more blocks for the wonky kites quilt and of course make the quilt. - top completed, still no backing.





6. Make a quilt for my little sister's (i.e. cousin's) wedding - blocks for the top are ready, but no peeking yet.

7. Make the red/pink/brown diamonds picnic blanket/smaller quilt with the ex-hexies from Lynz. - I'm afraid you're going to laugh at me, but it's back to hexies, with this stripe in the middle and a bit of space on each side. This is just the design, but I'm halfway through with piecing the top now.

(the Australian quilt was used as a design "wall" here)

These are the new (or rather not-yet-summarized) finishes:

8. Make a mini quilt for Modern Mini Challenge

9. Make one more quilt about which I'm not going to reveal much until it's finished - i.e. the not-so-secret quilt for my Dad

10. Finish the wavy quilt for my friend - there's just the binding to be hand stitched now, so I hope you won't mind my putting it in the finished section.

On the whole - not splendid, but not too bad either, don't you think?

(Of course there were also a couple of fails, as the making of 241 totes as gifts my friends has moved to some very distant future and I totally gave up on a mugrug for Quokka Quilts Mug Rugs of the world, but let's not dwell on this too much, ok?) 

and now for something completely different

The Aurifil Make-A Designer-Collection competition is coming to a close, but since Nana (the head of my illustrated mice family) decided to open her own quilt shop, the mice thought their preparations for the grand opening would be just the thing to show you. I couldn't say no, could I?

snowing up

I mean really, the snow is just floating in the air, with lots of the snowflakes actually going up instead of down. On April 1st. And I assure you it's no April Fools' joke.

Anyway, yesterday, in a rare half hour of sunshine, we managed to snap photos of the not-so-secret quilt. Dad insisted on holding the quilt himself.

I experimented with the quilting a bit, so most of the wavy lines are machine quilted with various polyester threads as the top thread

and neutral cotton as the bobbin thread. The rest of the lines, placed randomly in between, are hand quilted, also with various colours of polyester thread but I used double thread (is it what you call it?) to make it stand out a bit more.

As for the design, I wanted to create a kind of slightly choppy waves effect.This also meant that I didn't have to worry about matching the blocks, but instead just enjoy piecing the curves and then trimming the blocks down to the same size but not necessarily the same top and bottom width of the waves, if you know what I mean.
If you are interested in making something similar and would like to know more details I'll gladly share them.