Honeycomb Quilt

This quilt is one of the most frustrating I have ever made.  The idea was to make a twin-sized quilt, but due to a major miscalculation on my part, I now have a lovely cot-sized quilt and absolutely no-one to use it! 

The template started out much larger and, in a moment of sheer stupidity, I decided it would be a great idea to cut out all my fabric into squares of a sufficient size to be able to just draw round my template and cut more than one at a time.  I measured my hexagon from top to bottom, added an inch 'just in case', and blithly set about chopping up my fabrics. Unfortunately, what I'd failed to account for was that a hexagon's longest 'side' is from side to side (if you see what I mean).  When I'd cut up all my fabrics into the required number of squares and tried to put my template onto it, it didn't fit!  So, I had to cut down my template to a size that fitted my squares.

Note to self - next time check that the template fits the square before cutting them all out!  (Or, better still, perhaps it would be better to cut them out one at a time)

My next challenge was the quilting.  I'd decided that I'd do simple straight line quilting, using a quilting stitch built into my machine.  A trip to my local sewing shop provided 3 reels of a variegated Sulky thread that I'd heard so much about and thought would be great to use.  The sewing shop owner said that I should use a top stitch needle, but I sort of ignored this advice.  I was machine quilting, and you use a machine quilting needle when you're machine quilting, don't you?  Another very bad decision.  After having to take out 2 lines of quilting due to the fact that the thread was constantly breaking, I thought that perhaps the advice I'd been given in the shop wasn't as odd as it sounded, and changed my needle to a top stitch needle.  It did lessen the breakage I'd been experiencing, but, even though I tried every tension setting I could, the thread broke quite regularly.  Now I am not sure if it was something I was doing or not, but I've never had this problem with any other thread I've used.  Would I use Sulky thread again?  At the moment, it is not likely. 

All in all, the quilt has turned out very well and I'm pleased with the result.  Now I just need a home for it to go to.

A Playmat for an Expected Arrival

As my son and his wife are expecting their first child in August this year, I think it is time, as a first-time grandmother, to start sewing!  So I started with a playmat.  It is simply squares of fabrics from Connecting Threads which I have chenilled.

 

I used several layers of mostly solid colours - cornflower, orange, lemon and a softer blue, for the chenille.  It was very easy and fun to make and it will only get better with more washings.

I bound it in the same cornflower blue as I used as a 'background colour' for the chenilling (is that how you spell it?).

A close-up of the chenilled side...

... and of the main fabric from Connecting Threads. 

It has already been christened - a friend brought her new-born baby to see me recently and it came in very handy as a playmat and changing mat.

Due to increasing senility, I needed somewhere to keep my camera, because I kept losing it, so I made this.  I used the tutorial from Sew-Mad's blogspot here http://sew-mad.blogspot.com/2008/02/triple-c.html.  I must have added a little too much 'wiggle' room and it has turned out a little too big so I will need to make another, slightly smaller, one, but (for now) I am happy with it.

(That "increasing senility" I was talking about above - well, I was searching high and low for my camera to take a photograph of this camera case.  Can you guess where it was?  Enough said.)