Just finished another cute quilt, the pattern is, I love Home from Jacquelynne Steves Here
I´ve had this pattern for ages but only got around to making it now. Sometimes I really just like to follow a pattern, I still feel like I´m being creative without the anxiety of …..is what I am creating here ridiculous or is it good…. 🙂 yep I´m never quite happy with what I create from scratch.
This quilt was also an opportunity for me to practice some free motion quilting, I did feathers, pebbles and stippling, but the feathers were my goal, I´ve been wanting to try those for ages, and they didn’t come out to badly, just a few wobbles here and there.
Here is an image of the back.
And here it is, all finished , another quilt to add to my granddaughter´s collection.
A while back I finished a quilt based on a pattern by Suzys sitcom – Esmeralda´s garden Here When I first saw the pattern I really liked the fact that the background was dark depicting a nighttime garden. I’m so used to making quilts on white backgrounds, that it was quite a change to work with black.
I changed some of the animals to ones that my granddaughter would find easier to identify, such as the owl, hedgehog and snail.
To make the animal blocks I only used my fabric scraps, I honestly thought I would make a huge dent on my scraps, but not true, I still have too many scraps, so now I´m planning a new scrap busting project.
I had quite a problem with the fusible I used on this project. I had heard so many good things about Steam a Seam Lite, that I ordered a whole bunch from Amazon, it was quite expensive with transport costs etc, it´s not available for sale in Portuguese stores. As soon as I started sewing down the applique pieces, my thread started shredding, and I couldn’t figure out why, I tried different needles, re-threaded a bunch of times, watched loads of videos on You tube on how to do maintenance on my machine, sanded lightly the top plate of the bobbin area in case it had a notch that the thread might be catching on, etc etc.
The thought that it might be the fusible never ever entered my mind, until I happened upon an old online post, where someone was having the same problem, and the culprit was Steam a Seam lite, it gums up the needle, and the thread gets caught on the gummy needle and shreds. So, I was totally ecstatic that the problem wasn’t my machine, and totally horrified that I had all these appliqued blocks ready for sewing down the appliques and I couldn’t sew for longer than a few seconds before the thread would shred.
Well….. I had to finish the quilt, I simply can´t have unfinished projects. So I got a Q-tip and poured some rubbing alcohol into a saucer, and every 10 seconds would stop and clean the gunk off the needle with the alcohol soaked Q-tip. Needless to say a lot of cursing went on during this whole tiresome process 🙂 Now of course I still have a bunch of steam a seam that I don´t want to use ever again.
In spite of the issues I had with the fusible. I really love this quilt, I simply love the idea of a garden coming to life during the night.
When not in use, it lives in my granddaughter´s bookcase, because it also has a story to tell.
The Monkey thorn 