Made this lovely little upcycled baby quilt for my dear friend Karen B. in the Netherlands, as she and her partner are set to welcome their first child into the world. I started with a simple square-block design, and then pierced the order with some colorful strips of chaos, fitting for the life-altering-ness of a baby. I like the stripey border, which I made a little wider on the top and bottom to help make it a bit more of a rectangle. I quilted it simply with horizontal lines along the border between the colorful stripes, and then quilted down either side of the strips. Did a pieced backing with a panel of that beautiful egret upcycled curtain fabric I was given. And bound it all in the border fabric, which has a little bit of an offset confetti feel. I love it! Hope baby Brummel spends many a cozy nap on this quilt from Auntie Amy in Canada!
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So many friends having babies... and another fun baby quilt on the blog! This time for my beautiful friend Julia S. who recently welcomed Zawadi into the world. While Julia is French, she lives in Joburg with her Zimbabwean partner, so I thought it would be fun to make her a baby quilt with some fabrics spanning the African continent, along with some more classic details. So, I dug out of my stash fabrics from South Africa, Ivory Coast, Tanzania and Ghana, and got to work!
I combined the fabrics into groups of three similar-ish colorways and made strip sets, cutting those down again into 7 inch blocks. I then arranged them into an alternating pattern (both color and direction) and bordered everything in a modern, graphic woodgrain fabric that I love. For quilting I experimented with nesting triangles cutting across the blocks, and then bound it all together with some cool fern binding I made from another favourite fabric from the stash. The design is simple and the palate is perhaps a bit 'ample', but I love this quilt: soft, colorful, funky and beautiful. I hope that Julia and Ish like it, and little Zawadi gets many years of use out if it! Pleased to have this one off my to-do list and on to my couch! When living in South Africa years ago, I collected several fun fabrics that I have wanted to turn into a lap quilt for myself as a memento. This is obviously a very simple quilt, meant to show off the fun fabrics rather than doing fancy piecing.
In addition to the African fabrics, I used a cool orange-blue variable weave cotton for the border (thanks Margie for the gift certificate for Fabrications!), and used a thick variegated purple-orange-yellow cotton thread to do some simple quilting lines along the border and in the centre panel. I decided to make binding out of the border fabric-- not sure if I love that decision, but makes for a clean look. And I used a thick cotton bedsheet for the backing (thank you Value Village!) Happy to have this ready to use, and on to the next project! Confession time: friends, I have a bad habit of lusting over different fabric patterns and mashing them together to share my general delight with the array... case in point, this runner.
I love all of these fabrics, and threw them all together in a delight-filled frenzy to make a runner for my dear friends Liz and Dave on a trip last year to Johannesburg. A mix of graphic fabrics, more traditional florals, along with splashes of tie-dyes and stripes. A bit frenetic, but does the trick to inject a little color into a room. Hooray! Liz brought this runner with her to Scotland while she is up there pursuing an academic dream (go Liz go!). And that is also one of the things I love about sharing sewing projects with friends and family-- often easy and portable, they can travel with you as a little (colorful) piece of home. Thanks for sharing dear Liz! Color! Pattern! Awesome! A very simple table runner made with a variety of fabrics from my time living abroad. Mixture of batik/ wax patterns and cotton prints from Western and Southern Africa, given to my sister Lesley
One of the fun things about travelling are the small reminders you bring back home with you. I travelled on the trans-siberian railway in 2012, and spent about a week in Mongolia during that trip. I loved the country and my time there, and wanted to bring back some fabric from the country. After much searching and a lot of awkward hand gestures and smiles, I picked up a small assortment of fabric from a woman at a local market. It has been waiting to be used, and I decided to just go for it! So I did up a few very simple but colorful runners in October 2014. To be honest, the fabric was hard to work with-- very plastic and it pulled apart easily. So I didn't attempt anything more elaborate than stripes. A version of this runner was given to Anders (friend), Anne Marie (friend), Taryn (colleague) and Leah (sister), as well as keeping one myself as a reminder of my Mongolian adventure. |
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