Personal Projects

Jelly Roll Race Quilts

Beatrice | November 2, 2024 | 1 Comment

You might remember that I won the “Left, Right, Centre” game at last year’s guild Christmas party and ended up with a hotchpotch of 120 jelly roll strips in every colour and pattern imaginable. It only took me a day or two to decide what to do with them – since they were all so mismatched, a Jelly Roll Race quilt felt like the perfect solution. I had never made one before, but I knew of the pattern, and plenty of instructions are available online.

I actually finished two of the tops right away – they were done before New Year’s! The third one, however, had to wait until summer, but as soon as I wrapped that up, I quilted all three of them. I also finally found a method for binding quilts entirely by machine that works well for donation quilts. For my own quilts, though, I’m still a bit picky and will probably always take the time to stitch the binding down by hand – I’m just not fond of the flat look that machine binding tends to create. My trick is to use a decorative stitch instead of a straight one. There’s a lovely curved stitch on my machine that meanders over the binding edge, making any irregularities on the back less obvious.

All three quilts have been donated to a local charity, the Ann Davis Transition Society. One of our guilds regularly provides them with quilts, and I know from past deliveries that they try to give as many quilts as possible to the children who come seeking shelter with their mothers. Supporting this effort means a lot to me.

Personal Projects

Sew Many Bags: My Travel and Wallet Projects

Beatrice | October 21, 2024 | 1 Comment

Back in November 2022 at a guild meeting, three members presented a trunk show featuring all the bags, purses, and wallets they had made. I hadn’t made a bag in about ten or twelve years, but when I saw one member’s “Ultimate Travel Bag” (a By Annie pattern), I fell in love immediately. So, when the Black Friday sale at the quilt shop came around, I went ahead and bought the pattern, fabrics, and all the other supplies. By Annie has fantastic video instructions on their website, and although it took me a while and was a bit fiddly at times, I finished the bag. I even had enough leftover fabric to make a smaller project called “Easy Does It” (a By Annie pattern).

My cats loved the bag as much as I did—they climbed all over it and even inside, thinking it was the best adventure playground.

The guild friend whose bag had inspired me mentioned that she ended up making four of them because all her friends loved it and wanted one, too. So, I decided to make another one for my mom before flying to Germany to visit her in June 2023. Once again, I had enough leftover fabric to make her a matching “Easy Does It” bag as well.

Have you ever heard of the “Necessary Clutch Wallet” (an Emmaline pattern)? I’m not sure where I first came across it, but I remember my friend Connie had made one, and I really liked it. Since I was already in bag-making mode, I decided to give the NCW pattern a try after finishing the travel bag sets. And wow, was it addictive! I made one for myself and then four more to give to friends and my mom. There’s a whole community out there hooked on making these clutch wallets, with excellent video tutorials, and I found it easy to follow along. Once I got the hang of it, I set up my own little assembly line and had them all done before leaving for Germany last year.

During my 2023 trip, I realized the “Ultimate Travel Bag” was a bit too big for my liking. While it is the right size for airline carry-on luggage, I don’t usually bring that much with me on board, and I found it cumbersome to lug around. I had already bought another pattern, the “Executive Carryalls” (also By Annie), which are designed as laptop bags. The pattern has two options: a smaller laptop cover and a slightly larger bag with room for extra items. Since we had booked a trip to New Zealand for February 2024, I decided to make the bigger laptop bag to see if its size would work better as my carry-on. Once again, I had enough leftover fabric to make a matching “Easy Does It” bag.

I also made the larger version of the Quick Zip Cases (another By Annie pattern). It was meant to be a quick Sunday afternoon project – though it took a bit longer since I put the zipper in the wrong way! But in the end, I was really happy with how it turned out.

My two “Easy Does It” bags, the Zip Case, and the Clutch Wallet all fit perfectly into the Executive Carryall, along with my glasses, phone, and the few other odds and ends I needed for the flight. I’m much happier with this smaller version of carry-on luggage.

Personal Projects

Round Robin Four Seasons

Beatrice | November 23, 2022 | 4 Comments

I just realized that I never posted pictures of my Covid Round Robin project. We started it in the fall of 2020 with the guild, to keep us occupied during the first winter of Covid when we couldn’t have any guild meetings. Four people formed a group, and there were basically no rules, each group could do whatever they wanted. Most did a real Round Robin, one group did a Row Robin and my group decided to just do a Block Robin. I picked the four seasons as my theme and made a spring block with flowers, Easter eggs and a butterfly. Connie was next and chose to make a poinsettia for the winter block. Evelyn’s block is an amazing summer garden scene with birds and sunflowers and another butterfly. Kim had to take what was left and created an autumn scene with pumpkins and a squirrel.

Round Robin Four Seasons Spring — Spring – Beatrice

Round Robin Four Seasons Summer — Summer – Evelyn

Round Robin Four Seasons Autumn — Autumn – Kim

Round Robin Four Seasons Winter — Winter – Connie

I actually finished the quilt rather quickly. I believe the last exchange was in March or April of 2021, and I had it assembled, quilted and bound by June 2021. Orange is not usually my favourite colour but with the blocks I had it seemed like the best choice for sashing and borders. I custom quilted it, trying to find background filler designs that matched the theme of the blocks. It was in the quilt show this October and is now hanging on the wall in front of me, over my desk which finally made me realize that I never took pictures of it, an oversight that I corrected immediately 🙂 I am quite happy with the way it turned out.

Personal Projects

Preemiequilt Collection

Beatrice | September 12, 2022 | 2 Comments

Even though I haven’t been to Germany since the beginning of Covid, I am still sewing preemiequilts. These eight are from 2020 and 2021. I am hoping to visit my mom again next year, and hopefully I’ll have eight more little quilts ready by then. I usually have one feature fabric that I buy on sale and use for the back and outer border, and then make up the rest from my leftovers and stash. The NICUs prefer to have just a few seams and not too much quilting, so I usually just stitch 4 inch squares together and quilt through them diagonally.

Longarm, Personal Projects

Another We Care Scrap Quilt

Beatrice | February 26, 2021 | 6 Comments

I finished another scrappy donation quilt this month, using my favourite scrap pattern. I often custom quilt donation quilts as well, they are great practice objects but I didn’t have time to play around, so I used a pantograph instead that I have wanted to try for quite a while. It is called “Chiffon” and I have used it in a smaller version as a background filler but never in the default edge-to-edge size. That’s another really neat thing about scrap quilts, almost any quilting design will work. This one has already been donated to the guild, and I have started making another donation quilt, a great way to use up leftovers and do something useful.

Edit: Every time I post a picture of one of these, people start asking for the pattern in the comments. There isn’t a pattern that you can purchase. This is something that one of my German friends came up with years ago. I’ll try to explain, maybe you can figure it out by just looking at the pictures. You alternate light and dark fabrics and always press the seams away from the light pieces. I put it together in rows, I find that easier than looking for blocks. The big squares are 4″ squares (including seam allowance, so 3 1/2″ finished size). The small squares are 2″ squares, the rectangles are 2″ x 4″. This means you can just start with 4″ squares and cut them into the smaller pieces (halves and quarters) as needed, without having to worry about seam allowances. They will fit together. You can actually do this with any size squares… if you start out with 5″ squares and cut them in half or quarters, you can put it all together without having to worry about the math.

This might sound a bit confusing but just take a few 4″ squares in light and dark values and give it a try. It’s super easy, and you can make the quilt as big or small as you want to.

Personal Projects

Drawing Tablet Case

Beatrice | January 25, 2021 | 2 Comments

This weekend, I managed to do some spontaneous personal sewing. I bought a drawing tablet last year, and I have been meaning to make a case for it ever since but somehow never found the time. Or didn’t feel like doing it when I actually had some time. Turns out that once I started, it didn’t even take long. I have made a lot of these cases for all kinds of things over the years, it is easily adaptable to any size. I can never remember how to actually put it together, there is no real pattern, and it can be quite confusing to figure out which piece goes where and how to turn it all inside out, so that none of the seams are visible in the end. I think I was also a bit confused about metric and Imperial measurements and added too much extra fabric on the sides, so the case isn’t as snug as I would like it to be, but hey, that’s better than the other way around, and I am definitely not going to start over. I used Kamsnaps as buttons, and I didn’t have regular round ones in a suitable colour, so I went with the little flower heads and added a few more tiny buttons along the edge, just for fun. I like it although I am surprised that I managed to produce something for my personal use that is not pink 😉

Personal Projects

Another Scrappy Donation Quilt

Beatrice | January 15, 2021 | 4 Comments

After quilting all day long for others, it is sometimes not so easy to find the motivation to work on my own projects at night, especially when they require paying attention. Mindless chain piecing on the other hand can be quite relaxing, and I always have scraps at hand to turn into donation quilts. I started this quilt using my favourite scrappy pattern last summer and was surprised how fast I finished the top. Sneaking it into the quilt line up on the other hand is sometimes a bit tricky. I managed to squeeze it in at some point, and this quilt has already been donated to our guild’s We Care program. This morning, when I put the border on the next scrappy donation top, I realized that I had never posted pictures of this one, so here they are.

Personal Projects

Fruit Salad

Beatrice | February 29, 2020 | 1 Comment

More than a year ago my friend Doris gave me a box of berry fabrics, saying she had made several quilts using these fabrics and was tired of them now. She thought maybe I would have a use for them. Well, it was a box of free fabric… what was I supposed to do, right? I took it home, and when I opened it I saw that there were even a few blocks inside. I don’t remember how many, maybe six or seven. I decided to make more blocks and turn this into a donation quilt for our guild. I didn’t have a plan, and that is not the way I usually work. I need a plan and a backup plan and possibly even a backup backup plan. Just making blocks not knowing where I was going was hard work for me, and that’s why it took so long to finish this quilt. That and a lack of time, of course.

I finished the top before Christmas and managed to quilt it over the holidays. Although I usually like to custom quilt all my own projects, I decided to use a pantograph this time and picked “Strawberry Fields”. I figured I might as well add more berries to the mix. And the quilt is so busy that any custom quilting would have been lost anyway. Then other things took priority, and I finally managed to put on the binding this week, yay. Now I just have to sew on the label, and it will be ready to be donated at the March meeting.

Longarm, Personal Projects

365 Challenge Quilt – My Version

Beatrice | May 16, 2019 | 2 Comments

I have been really slow in posting here lately, there just aren’t enough hours in the day. In the meantime I managed to finish another one of my personal projects. In 2016 the 365 Challenge Quilt was a big hit, and I started making the blocks in January, not knowing if I really wanted to make the whole quilt. But it sounded like fun, and I made a block a day for the first two months of the year. Then the blocks went into a box because we moved to a different house, and I unpacked them again a year later. I managed to make another month’s worth of blocks and then decided that I didn’t like the project. I was getting increasingly frustrated with the instructions, it was very obvious that the designer had just drawn up the quilt in EQ but never actually sewn it, and I ended up unpicking several blocks and redoing them my way. I gave up, and the blocks went back into a drawer.

Last November I signed up with this project for my guild’s UFO challenge. Giving myself this deadline was the only way I was ever going to finish this quilt, I was very close to just putting the blocks on the giveaway table at the next guild meeting. I put them together in a way that is close to the original design, and I still don’t like the quilt. Considering how long it took to assemble all those 3″ blocks and how small many of the pieces are, the layout just doesn’t do it justice in my opinion. The individual blocks just get lost in that dark border. Quilting the centre block was fun but I didn’t put too much effort into the pieced borders, the quilting wasn’t going to be very visible anyway. I picked a floral pantograph design and then just echoed around it. I actually prefer the back, I pieced leftover fabrics because I didn’t have enough of the floral batik and couldn’t get more. But it is finished, so I will stop complaining, and I will donate it to the guild’s We Care program next month.

Personal Projects

Old Faithful and Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

Beatrice | February 19, 2019 | 13 Comments

I realized a while ago that for someone who constantly claims not to have UFOs, I have quite a few… Not a whole lot by an average quilter’s standard but still too many for my taste. One of my guilds is having a UFO challenge this year, and I signed up to finish three projects until May. These are the first two, Old Faithful Geyser and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. I made those two blocks almost ten years ago, I actually wanted to make a whole Yellowstone quilt. I remember that I started working on a third block with a bison but somehow that never got past the design stage, the blocks were stored safely in a box and moved halfway around the world with me but I never really thought about them again. Until last year when I joined the “My Happy Place Row Along” and went back to my designs to create my Yellowstone row. I didn’t feel the need anymore to make a whole Yellowstone quilt, especially with the wall hanging that I made from the row, but I still liked the blocks very much. They were made during a time when I experimented a lot with different materials and stitches, and I piled lots of yarns and wool on top of the block and free motion stitched with different colours to create texture. I decided to turn them into small wall hangings and just added borders to the blocks. I am very happy with the way they turned out.

Ich behaupte ja immer gern, dass ich keine UFOs hätte, aber irgendwie haben sich doch ein paar angesammelt… Immer noch keine große Zahl, verglichen mit anderen Quiltern, aber doch zuviele für meinen Geschmack. Eine meiner Gilden hat in diesem Jahr zu einer UFO-Challenge aufgerufen, und ich habe mich mit drei Projekten angemeldet. Bis Mai sollen sie fertig sein, und hier sind schon mal die ersten beiden, der Geysir Old Faithful und der Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Die beiden Blöcke habe ich schon vor fast zehn Jahren genäht, damals wollte ich einen ganzen Quilt zum Thema Yellowstone nähen. Ich hatte auch mit einem dritten Block begonnen, der aber irgendwo im Design-Stadium eingeschlafen ist. Die Blöcke wurden ordentlich weggepackt, kamen in eine Kiste und zogen mit mir um die halbe Welt. Erst im letzten Jahr, als ich beim “My Happy Place Row Along” mitgemacht habe und für mein Yellowstone-Muster auf die alten Designs zurückgriff, fielen sie mir wieder ein. Einen ganzen Quilt zu dem Thema wollte ich nicht mehr machen, zumal ich ja schon die Reihe aus dem Row Along in einen Wandbehang verwandelt hatte, aber die Blöcke gefallen mir immer noch gut. Damals hatte ich gerade eine Phase, in der ich alle möglichen Materialen verwendet habe. Es wurden jede Menge Effektgarne und Wolle auf den Block gehäuft und dann freihändig darüber gestickt. Die beiden Blöcke habe ich jetzt in kleine Wandbehänge verwandelt und nur noch Ränder angefügt. Mit dem Ergebnis bin ich sehr zufrieden.