Monday 6 June 2011

Fabric from Melbourne!

I was in Melbourne for the weekend and came home with a little bit of fabric...

One of my favourite places to shop is Clear It on Brunswick Street, Fitzroy. Upstairs, there are bolts of fabric on sale - and much of it is from designers such as Alannah Hill!  For instance, several years ago I bought the pink stripey top featured below from an Alannah Hill store.  Then, I found the same fabric on sale for $5/m.   

These are the fabrics I bought on this trip:


The pink and green fabric on the top left are beautiful wools that I want to make into coats (for some little girls) similar to the one I found in a magazine and selling for $120 AUD.   


The top three pink items are all knits and will be used to make some tops.  The hideous ribbon thing on the right (what on earth was Alannah Hill thinking?!?) will be perfect for fairy - or perhaps more appropriately Hawaiian - skirts for the same girls.  I'm sure they will love them - even if their parents won't let them out in public in these skirts....

Clear It also had some fabulous buttons for sale and I couldn't resist getting a selection.


I also managed to get a liberty cotton (from Tessuti Fabrics) and a linen (The Fabric Store).  

I'm looking forward to my next Melbourne visit so that I can add to the fabric stash at home! 

Wednesday 1 June 2011

quilt in progress

I always seem to have a million things on the go at any time!  One of the projects I am working on at the moment is a quilt for friends who are expecting their first child in June.  They were keen for something with Dr Suess on it and I just happened to have some material in my fabric stash that was suitable....  I agonised over how I was going to make the quilt, but in the end (after several abandoned attempts) I decided I wanted something that was a little crazy - just like Dr Suess and his characters!

I adapted a technique for designing and sewing the quilt from Philippa Naylor which is described in her book Quilting in the Limelight (2009):

I designed my pattern/quilt shape on freezer paper, labelled each of the pieces and then cut them out.

Next I ironed individual freezer paper pieces to the Dr Suess characters I wanted to feature.  I added a 1/4 inch seam allowance to each piece of fabric. (My favourite tool for adding any seam allowance is the attachment on my rotary cutter seen in the picture below)

Once all the pieces were cut out and arranged, I sewed them together (while keeping the freezer paper in place to act as a guide for the stitching).  This is the result:
I sewed blue piping around the outside of the quilt because I wanted something a little different and to give some definition to the quilt. To do this I used a technique described in another of my books, Piping Hot Curves (2007) by Susan K Cleveland. 

I've added an orange border to the quilt


and now I am contemplating how I finish it....

I think I am going to cut the outer edge in a similar curvy way to the body of the quilt, and I want the quilting in the border to be a little random as well.  But I am not really sure how I am going to quilt the rest of it....  However, my backing fabric arrived yesterday so I will have to get cracking!!