Hopefully I shall have lots more inspiration :D

So yes, as some of you may know, I'm off to Egypt tomorrow. Its been a dream of mine for a good couple of years and FINALLY its happenning!!

Im hoping to get so much more inspiration for designs, just thinking about it i've come up with a couple of ideas!

This is also a post just to let you know im not going to be posting over the next week but I do have a couple more cushions that i've made to show you.

If anyone wants to suggest ideas to do with a cushion based around Egypt, I'd welcome them! I'll put up a couple of pictures when i'm back. I'm sure you're all so excited to see what its like :D

Another Present for Someone Else!?

All I seem to do is make cushion covers for other people! (HAHA, Joke!!)

This one, again a present for my mum for her birthday, because yes, another cushion on the sofa needed a new cover. And I stepped in.

Now... I have clearly mastered the whole Square cushions and square/triangle patches, but here I was using rectangles. And this required me to sew in straight lines for a longer amount of time :P No matter how many patchworks I do, I still worry that its not going to go right. At least that makes me more careful I suppose.

Anyhoooo. Again, this cover required me to go off on a hunt for fabric. Although the red cushions in An Upgrade for the Sofa went down well, the colours didn't quite match that of the living room. (not that there is much of a colour scheme, I just like to let my mum think there is) So yes. I went on a long, looonng hunt. I just couldnt find the right colours. I found one, but then the shop had HIDDEN (hidden!) the creamy light colour. How very silly of them. The darker brown I only decided on at the last second. My mum does like nature and such, hence my decision of the leaves, but I was going to go with a fabric with gold swirls on:

So yes, thankfully I made the right decision, got to keep the rest of the fabric that I didn't use (naturally) and also had a quick look in the fat quarters bins for something for me! I'll show you in another post pretty soon cause I have funky ideas I wanna show you!!!

Getting home and making... well, I easily worked out the dimensions and measurements for each piece of fabric, cut them out for one side, lay them out to see what it'd look like, and decided it didn't quite look right (The side with more cream than brown) So I swapped the colours around for the second side and thankfully it looked much better.

So yes... I ended up with a pretty cushion cover, again substituted for me having to buy a 'real' present :P

Quilting Gallery

Well another website that I've been added to:
http://quiltinggallery.com/

  Go check it out. Theres lots of interesting stuff on there :)

I honestly cant remember!

This next cushion:

Well as the title says I really cant remember much about making it. Well, other than I did (obviously) and having trouble deciding on which fabrics to use. The pink and the splotchy ones were both birthday presents. (They both came with another, a nice royal purple colour, which i'd been wanting for ages. This purple has since been used in another design that will appear on here in a couple of days time !!)

Anyway, apparently, the shop that they were bought from was lovely and had so many different fabrics. Sadly I didn't get to visit it! I was offered the choice of either being able to choose my present or having a surprise, so I chose surprise! Now I wish I'd been able to go to the shop, but its over in Germany so I don't really get a chance that often :(

Anyway, another present I'd had was a book on patchwork blocks and this design came from one of those blocks. Stemming from my overwhelming success with triangles, as mentioned in I was bored ok?, I felt confident enough to keep working in triangles. Plus it mixes up the designs so im not just sat sewing square after square together.

But yes. I do believe that this turned out quite well :) Thankfully I also had a cushion inner to go in it already so its not just sat around waiting!!

I was Bored ok??

Next one:

This one occurred because I was bored... and felt like doing something. So I decided to try my hand at patch-working with triangles. This was the first time I had done so, but I kept telling myself it couldn't be too much harder than squares, after all, when you sew two triangles together you get a square!! (Aaaaand I was back in my comfort zone!) 

So yes, this was the result of a boring (I would say rainy but then I may be lying and its rude to lie!) afternoon. Turned out ok I think. It is a bit smaller than most others, and because of this I found it hard to actually find a cushion to fit inside. You see thats my main problem. I make the cover without thinking about the filling :P

Anyway, I particularly like this one because the white fabric, although you're not able to see on the picture above, is covered in hieroglyphics, and to those of you who know me... well you'll know that I'm absolutely mental about Ancient Egypt.

Imagine this one but white with white printed hieroglyphics. Although now ive found this one i really want it :|

I think this fabric was the second I found with some sort of Egyptian pattern on, the first was the cushion I mentioned in Upgrade for Sofa that I didn't show cause it wasn't technically a patchwork. Again, I'll show at a later time! But anyway, I have now amassed a good number of Egyptianny fabrics with absolutely no clue as to what to do with most of them... so they're just sitting in my box till I have a brainwave :) I really should learn to not buy them... but they just call out to me!

Spreading the Word

Well, I'm trying to expand my readers to more than just my friends so I've been trying to find some websites that have lists of Patchwork Blogs so that I can add mine on. I found one the other day and after forgetting to send them my web address, I was added to the list :)

Theres a lot of blogs on there, not to mention to original blog itself 'Online Quilting' so go and check it out!

http://onlinequilting.wordpress.com/helpful-quilting-links/quilting_blogs/

Enjoy :)

Should I visit?

Due to a trip to London coming up this weekend, I decided to see if there were any good patchwork fabric shops in London. The main one I found is Tikki.

http://www.tikkilondon.com/index.html

 

Situated in Kew, near the botanical gardens, but within easy reach from the tube... (which i'd need to get to get there) My main dilemma is having enough time to have a good catch up with my cousin and seeing London proper before I'd have to leave for Tikki!!!

I dont know what to do... I do know that I want to visit though, it looks like my type of place :D

A Summer Project of mine - 2009

And here it is:

My first quilt :)

Technically, I did make another one a couple of years back, but that wasn't patchwork as such and I have no pictures of it as it was a 'Congratulations on being born' present to my baby (at the time) cousin.

However.... this beauty, well I know its relatively simple, just 8 blocks of 25 (if I remember correctly) squares. That was what took the longest really, cutting out all the squares ready to sew them together... Cleverly, if I do say so myself, I made a mock up on the computer, so I knew how much of each colour I would need! So, after cutting out all the squares, I started sewing it together. This bit went relatively quickly... straight line sewing is a doddle after doing it for ages. Bear in mind that I was heading to University for my first year that September so I needed to be finished by the end of summer :) 

Thankfully I managed this... and now have an amazing quilt that I love! Admittedly, at the end of that July I had absolutely no intention of making such a thing, It just came about when I decided to look through all the fabric I had gathered over the years and realised that I had a hell of a lot and that I should do something about it.

Those of you who are looking a bit closer at the actual quilt, you may notice that one square in each set looks a bit different. This is because I'd bought one of those strips with squares of designs and incorporated these in :)

See the ones with the Giraffe, Panda and Lemur? Yea those 3 were the ones I used!

One bit of advice for people, I know its pretty obvious and such, but don't use the same paper square template for all 200+ squares.... its bound to change size as you keep cutting! OOOOOPPPPSSS!!

Red Pepper Quilts

http://www.redpepperquilts.com/p/share-your-link.html

Cool website with lots of different blogs on :)
New Ideas coming up maybe??

An Upgrade for the Sofa

Not technically the next cushion cover I made, but that one technically isn't a patchwork (So im gonna leave it out for now)

These two came about from my mum mentioning that she needed new cushion covers for two of the cushions on the sofa. Since her birthday was coming up, I decided i'd be the most awesome daughter in the world and make her some :P

So off I went to the nearest fabric store (which by the way I can happily spend ages in just looking and deciding which fabric would be deemed worthy of coming back home with me! Normally I end up with at least 2 that I have no clue what I'll use them for but are so pretty that I cant NOT buy them!!)

Anyhoo back to the story; I had a couple of ideas as to what colours I needed so just went with my ideas... I came back with all 3 of the fabrics seen in the picture, with way too much of each. I do however justify this to myself by saying 'Well whatever I don't use for the cushion covers is mine :D' – this excuse works surprisingly well :D

So yes, these two cushions, now 2 years old if I remember correctly, were born within one day – they really were too simple for me! I will also say that they were appreciated and liked :) My cushion cover making continues!!!!!

'Kentucky Chain' Block

http://www.popularpatchwork.com/news/article.asp?a=51

LOOKS SO MUCH FUN!!

A Lesson in Cushion Cover making

Next? OK then. 

This one I made during my year 7 or 8 textiles lesson. We got to choose the fabrics that were going to be sewn in from a big bin full that lived in the classroom. I have absolutely no recollection of picking these or why I did, I must have thought that they were pretty, or perhaps it was all I could find that have similar patterns, either way its what I chose. We also had to draw some sort of picture onto the other 5 patches (see picture for my awesome bananas and apples!!! Testament to my amazing drawing skills right there) Again, I have no clue why I chose bananas and apples, although I think I can safely say that it did make mine a bit different from all the rest of the class. I think I went through a couple of different options, one including stars and moons (pretty obvious choice really and wouldn't have looked nearly as awesome as my fruits!!)

Now, the thing I remember most about this cushion cover was that the back kept fooling me!!! I was attempting to sew two panels on so that they overlapped in the middle of the back. However, as amazing as I was at 12 years old, this seemed well out of my grasp and I must have sewed it and un-picked it at least 3 times before I think I eventually got my teacher to do it for me!! To this day it still causes me trouble, but I have managed to thwart all their attempts to be better than me for at least the past 4 or 5 covers i've made!!

My Humble Beginnings!

I said i'd start with my oldest patchwork and here it is:

I know, its not much but it was made when I was 9 (11 years ago) on my holiday to visit my Grossmutter in Germany. Admittedly I didn't make it by myself and I had some help... but hey, I still have it to this day and I can remember both myself and my friend who had come with me getting excited by choosing the different fabrics! (All of them on this cushion are some sort of velvet/soft fabrics) 

Since my Grossmutter also makes patchworks, we have a number lying around the house here and im nowhere close to anything like she does! One day i'll catch up and id like to be able to send her one of mine :)

Another note: You may note the zip in this one... I have not once used a zip since... I think im slightly intimidated by them... plus i've found another way to close them which works perfectly fine for me!!

Finding my Feet

Well, here I am, all set up and ready to go!

I'll start off by saying that I have absolutely no clue as to what I'm meant to be doing, and that really i'm here to share my patchworks, designs and inspirations I have. As I have said in my 'About me' I usually decide to make a new cushion every now and then and receive an incredulous 'Another one?' from my Mum – This is due to my room being TINY and the fact that my cushions soon wont fit in it any more! 

Due to being a university student (Studying Architecture if you're interested; I know, it doesn't really mix well with sewing but hey, we all need some escape now and again huh?) there will be a complete and utter lack of anything physical actually being made during the term! However, I shall state here and now, that I will attempt to create some new ideas whenever I can at uni!

I would love to have ideas thrown at me... I am VERY prone to 'design block' so anything could be helpful at this point in time. I'm going to start by uploading my oldest patchwork first, explaining how it came about and such.