Does this sound familiar? An epidemic in the Wendover area!!!!

How To Quilt Your Swoon - Jenny Visit's The Sewing Bee

As you can see from Sue's SuperSwoon in the previous post - a Swoon, when completed, is a large and quite unmanageable king sized beast! I know that some of you brave soles intend to hand quilt your Swoon top. But for those who want a quicker solution I have been looking in to options for Long Arm Quilting. For those of you now wondering what a Long Arm Quilter is ( strange mental pictures abound!) I thought i'd explain a little.

To turn your Swoon from a single piece of fabric into a warm and three dimensional quilt you need to layer it up with some waddding and sew to secure these layers together. This can be done by hand or machine. However with a quilt of this size, trying to quilt it on a standard domestic sewing machine is very challenging as the quilt will be too big to move under the harp of the machine. A long arm sewing machine is an industrial sewing machine that moves over the quilt top (held on a frame) rather than the quilt moving through the machine. This method of quilting gives your quilt a dense snuggly texture.

The very lovely Jenny who is a local Longarm Quilter and works on many of my quilts will be coming along to the Sewing Bee at St Anne's on the 6th May to show us some samples of long arm quilting and she will have her computerised menu of patterns to allow you to look at and think about quilting styles if you would like to go down this route for your quilt.

Jenny will then be available on Thurs 12th of June for 30min appointments all day at The Workroom if you would like to book your quilt in to be machine quilted. Your quilt top doesn't necessarily need to be completed by this date as you can plan and choose a design in advance of finishing as long as you know what your final dimensions will be, but there will be a special rate available for all quilts booked in on this day. You will then be able to drop your finished tops off at The Workroom and pick them up from there when they are completed - how exciting!

For anyone from the Evening Bee who can't make the daytime events - do email Helen and let her know if you are interested in a separate session with Jenny. We will see if there is sufficient interest to run an evening session too.

Now I'm off to get some Swooning done, newly galvinised! debs x

Sue's Super Swoon

Sue's Super Swoon at The Workroom this week. Wow it's wonderful - good encouragement to get on with mine ( still languishing at one block at the moment) but there's plenty of company in the 'one-block-done' gang I think! How are you getting on with yours........?

Periodic table for stitchers

Now this periodic table I could have learnt....

I'm addicted and planning my next swoon

Here is my first machine pieced quilt in many years...........

The lights are behind washing out some of the colour and some of my flying geese have blunt beaks!!

Next job is to layer up and quilt, I'm going to hand quilt as my sewing machine needs to lie down in a darkened room to recover.

The hardest part was choosing the fabric combinations then placing the blocks..............

 

Need to create more floor space to lay out the next swoon..........

Man Baskets and more . . .

It is Claire, checking in with my current quilting project. As some of you may know I am recovering from another back op which went well but only time will tell it's real success. To aid my healing my wonderful mum,Pat, took the kids away for a holiday. The house was peaceful so I got sewing.

Before the op I had plenty of time to prepare for the long rest ahead so I decided on a manageable hand sewing project that I could cope with lying flat on my back. After my last op I finished the mammoth job of hand quilting my whole cloth quilt.

Anyway, I love bold colour and have longed to do some more sewing with Kaffe Fassett fabrics. I made my sister a lovely 40th present quilt and some of you may remember the stripy quilt I made one retreat day. 

Made for my sister

Retreat day quilt

So I decided on an Orange Peel project which is really simple, small and manageable. It involves paper piecing and applique. I prepared lots of 4" squares and orange peel shapes. My background squares are neutrals and the peels are bright and bold. A lot of fabric came from my stash but I just had to buy some new Kaffe Fassett charm squares. I don't think my husband has noticed yet! 

I am trying so hard to be random in my selection of fabrics as I pick them out of the bag but I do struggle with that! 

So here is progress so far and I am loving the way the squares look together.