I made a quilt

I've always loved the beautiful soft quilts that I see at friends homes. I always fancied making my own. A couple of years ago I decided to get started. I cut and pieced scraps together from my sewing offcuts. The process of cutting out took ages, and by the time I'd pieced a handful of small square and rectangles into bigger squares and sewn about 40 of them together, I'd had enough.

I was sorting through my stash and found the bag with this in. There were just a few squares left to sew together, and since my physio said I could do a bit of sewing as it was good for keeping circulation going in my operated on side, I thought I'd give it a go. I stitched the remaining few squares together and pressed the patchwork. not a bad size, about 1m by 1.5m. I found some fabric that was suitable for the backing and bought the wadding from The Sewing Machine Guy (he has some beautiful fabrics in stock - check them out or visit if you're in Northumberland). Ellen from Ellen's of Ellington showed me how to true the sides, pin the layers together and a really simple way to quilt it all together - I just used straight lines! Then she showed me how to bind it - the edges look great, but I'm not really happy with the corners - I think my binding was a bit too thick to get a really neat finish here.

I know many quilt artists would be shocked by my piecing and overly simple quilting, however, this quilt has used up a good chunk of scrap fabric, so it's definitely recycled. The only thing purchased was the wadding, so it was also cheap (materials wise). And with the current cold spell in the UK. I have sat underneath this for the last week, keeping warm. even the kids think it's warm and snuggly.

I'm not sure I'll ever make one again,  I'm trying to find different ways to use up my waste fabrics and just use less generally, but if I find myself with a supply of good quality cotton offcuts - well who knows?

Textile treats

My applique bird

I have been very fortunate to be able to attend two fantastic Textile workshops this week. Both organised by Creative Futures at Weave maker space. This is a fab resource just 5 mins up the road from where I live, but this week is the first time I've had opportunity to use it.

On wednesday evening I attended a workshop on silk paper making and bondable fibres. This was run by artist Wendy Ann Sranger. We experimented with making paper from a range of silk fibres and embedding different objects between them. The process was quite quick but it did take a while to dry. In fact my thicker piece took until Saturday morning to be completely dry.

Working with wet silk fibres

Angelina fibres, net and silk fibres

We also worked with angelina fibres - which i have used before. the process is quite simple. you just layer the fibres and other items and press with an iron, making sure the fibres are between non stick baking paper so they don't stick to the iron.


On Saturday I attended a full day workshop with textile artist Mandy Pattulo. I had seen some of mandy's work at local exhibitions and was intriqued by her processes. She gave a talk about how she approaches her work and what is important to her. Throughout her career as an artist she's been interested in tyhe use of quilts and the area of the UK we live in has a rich quilt history.

These are both examples of Mandy's work. 

She shared with us some of her work, you can see some more examples here.

We then learn about one of the techniques Mandy uses and used it to make out own applique on a piece of vintage quilt. We used a finger turned applique method. I was quite surprised how quickly I could do this. Our designs were then embellished with embroidery. I could certainly see myself using some of these techniques. especially when we do our school community quilt later in the academic year.

My applique bird

I'm looking forward to the next couple of workshops in about three weeks time.