A quick look at miniature quilts

Unsurprisingly the miniature quilts category at Festival of Quilts was full of tiny quilts, and by tiny I mean small. The flying geese one below is the approximately a hand’s length, so considering the size of many of the quilts on display, it’s teeny tiny!

The category guidance says that any technique or combination of techniques can be used, and the maximum length of any side is 30cm. It also says that in a photo (without any indication of scale) it should look like a full size quilt or wall hanging.

And these definitely do. Though I can’t get over the sizes of the centre geese in this miniature quilt.

GEESE IN A SPIN, JENNY ANDERSON

Would you have known this one was the length of my SIL’s hand? (BTW she has a normal sized hand in case you were wondering!) I’m not sure I would, and I’m also pretty sure I don’t have the patience (or the skill) to create something so intricate and so small.

While there were many miniature quilts on display, I only seem to have captured three of them. I think I must have been so wowed I forgot all about capturing all but my very favourites, and I totally agree with the title of this next one - you can never have too many hearts. Especially stripey ones!

YOU CAN NEVER HAVE TOO MANY HEARTS, KAREN LLEWELLYN-PARSONS

This final teeny tiny quilt is my favourite. You know I love a rainbow and a Liberty fabric rainbow is even better.

THE RAINBOW QUILT TEENY TINY, FLOWER CHILD

Isn’t it gorgeous.

And I guess that I need to pay more attention to this category when I’m back at this show later in the year, though it’s also quite fitting that it’s a tiny post for a tiny subject matter!

My first village quilt

I knew that I wouldn’t be making quite so many charity quilts this year (after all one a month is quite a lot!) but I didn’t think it would take until now for me to finish my first charity quilt of the year. I guess that’s partly down to life, but also not having the defined structure that I had last year with the mystery block of the month.

Earlier in the year I decided to try and use as many scraps as I could for these charity quilts, and this cute ‘village’ pattern by Sherri from A Quilting Life looked like it could be just the thing, as I mentioned when I posted my quilt plans for this year.

And with my tin of scraps I’ve been diligently making little scrappy houses, thoroughly loving the process of matching fabrics together.

I’ve taken the tin of scraps to a few sewing and patchwork group sessions and my houses were starting to accumulate. Which got me to wondering how many houses make a small village.

There was one way to find out, and as I’m a visual person (no surprises there!) I laid them out on top of my last charity quilt to gauge my progress. Well it worked for me!

And it gave me the spur to complete the last five or so I needed to equal(ish) the size of my previous quilts.

It wasn’t long before my village assembled, and acquired additional borders.

While I still love the look and process for straight line quilting, I wanted to try something different for this quilt. Partly because I’m wondering how straight line quilting would work for my larger mystery block of the month quilt, both practically and design-wise, or if something with more curves would be better suited to the mostly log cabin quilt.

But anyway without knowing more about wavy quilting I didn’t feel informed enough to make that decision, so I’ve wavy quilted this village using one of the preset stitches on my machine.

And I quite like how the wavy quilting turned out.

I also love how the scrappy houses have come together to form the perfect little village and I know that this design was the right choice for my charity quilts for this year. Isn’t it cute?

You can see my other quilts I’ve made to donate to Project Linus - a charity whose mission is to provide love, a sense of security, warmth and comfort to children, who are sick, disabled, disadvantaged or distressed through the donation of new, homemade, washable quilts and blankets.

A crochet bag for crochet

When I started going to my ‘crochet in the pub’ group I wasn’t sure how it’d go, or if I’d go back and so I wanted to take something relatively easy to do so that I could enjoy the group rather than have my head stuck in a pattern.

And so I chose some granny squares with some wool that I’d bought as part of a kit but which I didn’t really get on with.

I didn’t really have much of an idea what I’d do with them to start with, but as the weeks went by and my granny square numbers increased a plan formed - I’d make them into a bag for crochet projects, as a crocheted bag seemed a preferable option to one of the ubiquitous tote bags I was currently using.

So that’s what I did. I reckoned I’d need eight squares to cover the bag. Recently I reached that marker and joined my squares together, which could only mean one thing.

…It was time to sew in the ends!

Sewing in ends isn’t my favourite crochet task - yes I’m still sewing in ends to a blanket which was my lockdown project - but remarkably I had them sewn in in a few days, so the bag assembly could start.

Laying my assembled blocks alongside the bag I realised I could do with a bit more length so crocheted three stripey rounds at the top. And then turning the tote bag inside out - I’d decided that I might as well enjoy the patterned inside (formerly outside) of the tote - I put them together and using a dark thread attached them along the sides. Now this isn’t my neatest sewing attempt, but that’s ok - it’s functional!

I still wasn’t happy with the top though, that was until I added a row of single crochet to the top in the cream - to me it gives it the perfect finish. I was much more careful sewing the cream edging to the top of the bag, and it worked out really well.

Now I have a crochet bag for crochet! But I do need to find myself a new project to take along this week…