WIP Wednesday - Bring back my MOJO!

I have been having one of those weeks, where everything that can go wrong, does!

We were planning on going on holiday, but because of a wages strike at my husband's work, his leave got cancelled, grrr!  Now he's sort of on permanent standby, so our plans to go to the coast had to be cancelled.  The kids are even more disappointed, they have been really looking forward to it.

I don't even want to talk about what's been going on in my sewing room.  I am making silly mistakes!  I accidental stitched over the backing fabric.  Its luckily not a large area, so I had to rip out those stitches.

Not to mention the mistakes I've made fmq inside the red rectangle areas.  Lets see if you can pick up the directions of those feathers, the first few pictures does not show the errors, but its clearly visible on the last shot, oh boy...  

I just left it as it is.  I should have ripped those out too, but I feel so low and discouraged that I just don't have the strength to fix it.

Breath... breath... b r e a t h ! ! !

I'm linking up to WIP Wednesday @ Freshly Pieced.

Happy quilting.

Trapunto Quilting

Winter is here, and getting colder by the day.  So making time for sewing/quilting is hard, especially early mornings and evenings.  So I wait till the sun is warming up my little sewing space before I even think of doing any quilting.  


I would sit behind my laptop having few too many cups of coffee searching for ideas on the internet.  It's a wonderful source of information, especially since every thing I've learnt and learning still comes from this huge library.  So I was looking at trapunto quilting, how to and ideas.


So I thought of trying it and decided to do a small or rather medium quilt using circles.  

I used paisley FMQ design

Piecing this quilt was fast, simple and very quick.  I used scraps fabric for the circles.  I love how they 'pop' and it gives the quilt so much texture.  I'm about halfway done, and cant wait to bind it.  I plan on (if it comes out looking good) to put this on Kayleigh's wall.

Back of quilt

 Happy quilting.

Applique flower and stems wall hanging quilt

I thought of trying applique the other day, not even knowing which direction I should go, I searched the web for basic application of applique.  Seeing how simple it was I started straight away.  I started tracing basic shapes like circles, hearts , triangles and squares on cardboard.  

Using anything I could find, like different size bottle caps (for circles) I started tracing them on cardboard and cutting them out.  

From there I played around mixing them up, using the sharp edges of the heats and circles I made flowers too.

Even putting some of these shapes together made pretty designs.

That was when I thought of making a small but simple flowers with stems wall hanging quilt using my applique templates.  Again not sure where I will end up I arranged them on a piece of fabric to see the sizes of the flowers and ended up cutting 4, 10" blocks.






I roughly cut a piece of colour printed fabric that I wanted to use for the flowers, stems and leaves and ironed a strip of applique paper to the back of the fabric.  I then traced the designs on the applique paper and cut them out.

I used 3 different colour print fabrics for the whole quilt.

Pulling the paper from the back of the applique, I ironed on the flower making sure I applied the heat long enough to make it stick to the fabric.

Before I started stitching the design to the fabric I pinned a piece of wash away stabilizer to the back, to secure it nicely and to make sure the fabric wont pucker up.

I used a zig zag stitch to secure the flowers and stems to my block.

As this was a test quilt, and I wanted to see what I can do, I tried different filler free motion quilting on each of the four blocks.  Again Leah's designs came in very handy and used Stippling, Wandering Clover, Paisley and Echo-Arches.

Stippling

Paisley

  

Echo-Arches

Referring back to Leah's quilt along #7 I pieced the blocks together using binding strips, following her instructions was easy and I will definitely use this method again


 

I enjoyed playing around with this little wall hanging quilt, and found a spot in my sewing room to put it up.

Flowers and stems applique wall hanging quilt