I decided to make a quilt for my nephew’s 18th birthday. He’s the world’s biggest Arsenal fan so the theme was easy.
First I sourced a load of second-hand shirts off Ebay….
And cut them up…
Continue readingThe Arsenal Quilt
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Tag Archives: Sewing
Optical illusion quilt
This quilt is for my brother, who requested this pattern as it reminded him on an old video game we used to play.
It was fun to make, although I scaled it up in size to make it easier (the original cubes were very small and I wanted to make a king-sized quilt so needed to make it slightly easier for myself).
Annoyingly, I made a mathmatical mis-calculation – I scaled up the size of the pieces to cut out but I failed to increase the seam allowance by the same amount, so there have ended up being some holes and it looks a bit messy where they join teogether, but nevermind. Hopefully it’s not too noticeable in the end!
Geese in flight
Another quilt project I made for my mum’s partner, though somewhat belated due to Covid and Brexit and so on…
The pattern was called “Geese in flight”
It involved a lot of cutting with my new right-angled triangle ruler!
Lockdown Quilt
During lockdown I started on a new creative project to cheer myself up and help me keep busy, and five months later I have finally finished it! An appliqué quilt, but as I already have a winter quilt for my bed, I wanted to make it into a really bright, colourful, summer duvet cover instead.
I spent ages deciding on the pattern I wanted to use, and finally discovered this gorgeous pattern by Laura Heine.
It’s a paper-piecing technique where you cut out the shapes using the template provided (its the same template for every square) and then use double-sided sticky paper (fusible web as it’s often known) to iron it into place on the fabric. Then I sewed around all the edges to hold them in place and stop any fraying. Continue reading
Panda Pop Quilt
I’m a natural hoarder, so being a new mum I want to keep EVERYTHING – every babygro, every onesie, every adorable dress etc. However my house is now heaving with stuff and we simply don’t have space, plus I’ve been looking for a new crafty project to get my teeth into, so I decided to make a little memory quilt for my daughter using clothes she has grown out of. (Or more fashionably known as “Upcycling”).
After a little searching in the interweb I found a really cute pattern called a Panda Pop Quilt and I am thrilled with how it looks (although I have adapted the pattern a little). Continue reading
Slipcover Play Kitchen
I love a play-kitchen, as do most kids, but they are huge and bulky and take up a lot of space, which I really don’t have in my house at the moment, I saw this a few years ago and made one for my god-daughter, and decided to make another one for my daughter’s second birthday.
Tutorial: How to make a T-shirt quilt
T-shirt quilts are popular in the USA but less common in the UK as far as I am aware.
The idea is you find a collection of t-shirts, such as for your favourite football team, or collected on holidays or at music festivals, and cut them up to make a quilt. I tend not to wear t-shirts much, but in my work overseas in the humanitarian world, branded t-shirts are common to identify yourself as a staff of an NGO and make it easier to work with communities and government officials etc, as well as showing off your donor’s logo as required!
As a natural-born hoarder, I have kept all of my response t-shirts from all my overseas aid work, as well as various t-shirts collected from other events here and there, and I recently discovered them gathering dust and mould in my attic and decided my maternity leave was the ideal time to get started doing something useful with them.
It is also 10 years since my first deployment as a humanitarian to South Sudan in 2009, the beginning of my career as an aid worker, so a quilt to mark 10 years of my humanitarian career seems fitting! However I must admit that over the years some of the NGOs I have worked for have significantly more t-shirts than others, and one NGO I have worked with for around 3 years only ever had 1 t-shirt (once you settle into HQ you tend not to get so much of the branded stuff) so the quilt appears rather skewed towards one particular NGO which is not necessarily reflective of my career but nevermind – I’ll let you guess which one!
More crafty things
You may have noticed my blog has become utterly dominated with adoption stuff, because, you know, becoming a mum is the single biggest thing to ever happen to me. It’s fairly monotonous and dull, which is not unlike my life at the moment – very little else going on in my life so there’s less to write about.
However in my boredom I have been missing my pottery classes and so have set about doing some more knitting and sewing and crafting in the evenings to keep myself busy and less bored.
So to break up the monotony of talking about adoption and being a mum here are some of my recent crafty projects instead!
Crafty Play Kitchen
This was a little project I stumbled across on the internet and IMMEDIATELY had to make.
Luckily my god-daughter was about to turn 2, so I had the perfect opportunity to make it!! I was very pleased with the end result – it’s adorable, and the best part is that you can have a play-kitchen for your kids without having to have huge plastic toys and things taking up all the space in your house… It fits over a kitchen chair so you can just fold it up and put it away when you’re done. Continue reading
My first dress…
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My attempt at making my first ever dress – a few mishaps here or there, but in general it came out all right in the end! Fabric from Iraq, new sewing machine from John Lewis, pattern from New Look! Making … Continue reading
Had we but world enough and time... 