Dining room quilt.

I recently showed some fabric and blocks I was planning to make up into a wall hanging for my dining room, inspired by a tutorial on the wonderful Oh,Fransson!blog.
Before I had joined them into the quilt top a group of us from my sewing group met up for a session of fabric dying. The colours I chose went really well with the fabrics I was using for the quilt,

Here they are drying on the line.

Don't they just look fantastic ironed and piled up together?

Here they are with some of the quilt blocks.

I had planned to sash the blocks with a cream fabric and decided that the dyed fabrics would look great as a pieced inner border.

I'm not going to add an outer border but plan to make a pieced binding from the patterned fabrics.
Just got to decide how to quilt it now. Any suggestions?
Bye for now, Maria.

The birdies have landed!

Sorry to bore regular readers with this little quilt again. The little birdies have flown away and have now landed in their new home. Here they are with me just before they flew.

And here they are after they flew across the North Sea and landed in Holland with their new owner, my swap partner Marja. As you can see they have a lovely garden at their new home so if they get bored with their bright yellow surroundings they can fly into the lovely green garden. There's even another bird table for them to sit on. I wonder if Marja will leave some crumbs out for them!

Bye for now, Maria.

A new quilt started.

Since making the table runner I showed here I've been wanting to make a quilt in matching fabrics to hang on the dining room wall next to the side board on which table runner is displayed.

I ordered some more fabrics, all by Amy Butler, except the bottom one which is b y Heather Bailey.

I then had to decide on a pattern. I've seen lots of coin quilts on blogs and flickr lately and originally decided to make one but then I discovered a wonderful blog called Oh, Fransson! by Elizabeth Hartman. She makes some scrummy quilts using modern, square blocks sashed with mostly white linen and I decided this was the style to go for. Elizabeth sells some of her patterns on etsy but also has some free tutorials on her blog, they're definately worth a look.

I decided my quilt would consist of twelve blocks using six patterns with two blocks made from each pattern. Each block would contain two fabrics and I'm not sure how to describe this but the fabrics in each matching block would be placed in opposite positions in the blocks.

I've done six blocks so far. One is called Paint Box (top left and bottom right) and is from a tutorial on Oh Fransson! The other two blocks I designed myself.

I won't be sashing them with linen as I have some cream fabric to use up although I'm sure linen would look great. I'll show some more of the quilt as I go along.

I took this picture of a beautiful Aquilegia in my garden on a sunny morning last week. I just love the way it looks like it's lifting its face up to the sunshine.




Bye for now, Maria.