Embroidered canvases

As promised, my 'exciting' method for finishing stitcheries - well, I was excited, because it entailed the purchase and use of one of these:

So that I could do this:

and make lovely speedy projects like these:

All smoothed nice and flat and stapled firmly in place, and easy to hang!  (Val and Mike, sure you're not reading but if you are this is not a late Wedding gift, it's an early first anniversary gift, so stop looking at it please...)

Thought you'd like another look at my shiny beast of a staplegun.  I have another, slightly larger project underway with it at present: more soon!

Stitcheries for the shop

Recently I've made some tiny embroidered wall hangings; they are sometimes referred to as 'stitcheries' I've noticed. 

 

I asked Donna if she'd like to try some in the shop and we decided to give it a whirl!

I took them in on a Wednesday, and got an email from Donna on the Friday to say a customer had ordered a house stitchery, personalised with their name.  So, worth trying!

They've got little ribbon loops at the top to hang them up...

...so you can pop a peacock on your wall and smile at him as you pass by.

 

They were really fun to make, and as is typical in such things, as soon as they were done I found a much more exciting way to finish them off....

 ...but you'll have to wait for another post before I show you - making more samples!

Bev's Cath Kidston quilt

Do you remember the pictures from the first Basic patchwork workshop I ran?

Here's Bev trying to hide behind her quilt.  It came back to me, so I could quilt it for Bev.  I had free rein, so I went for an all-over flower meander to complement the floral CK fabrics Bev had chosen.

The photo in the garden is in bright sunshine so the colours don't look as vivid as they are in real life.

 I had great fun quilting big loopy petals all over the quilt.

 It's amazing how, once a quilt is quilted, it can look so different.

Now all Bev has to do is bind it.  Go Bev!

Sheila's Fan Quilt

Another custom quilting job recently completed : a stack-n-whack fan quilt.  It was a giant quilt!  It will look lovely on Sheila's bed.  You can see in the picture above, how Sheila has carefully chosen the same portion of fabric from which to cut each fan blade, making a fascinating kaleidoscope effect.

 

The brief was feathers: lots of feathers on all the white fabric, and swirls in the fans.  Here you can see one of the setting triangles, and the lovely batik backing fabric Sheila had chosen peeping out at the sides.  I ignored the block piecing seams and quilted a curved feather over each fan, extending all the way to the fans above it.

 

Above is the quilt when it was still on the frame...

...and here, spread out flat afterwards.  You can see that it is a quilt with a really high loft, owing to the extremely puffy batting : I usually quilt on much flatter batting but it was no problem at all and gave a lovely effect.  If you look carefully you can also see how different each fan is: because a different part of the fabric design was chosen for each set of fan blades, you get a lot of different patterns all from the same original fabric.

I finished Sheila's quilt a while ago but it was going in the Congleton Show so I've waited to put photographs up on the website.  It's rather nice revisiting a quilt I said goodbye to weeks ago!