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Finished: Community Garden – a scrappy, quilted wall textile

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This is a modern quilting blog focused on patchwork, scrappy quilts, zipper pouches, quilted bags, colour theory, and practical quilting tutorials. This post is one of my Quilt studio diary series, where I introduce my recently finished quilts and quilted items and share some thoughts about the process. Today’s finished creation is Community Garden / Siirtolapuutarha, a square, scrappy, quilted wall textile that features beautiful Kaffe Fassett precuts: Let’s go back in time to February, when I was still working on the quilt top. I shared photos of the whole process in my How it started – and how it’s going post back then. The post closed with an image of the completed scrappy centre piece, which reminded me of Modest Mussorgsky’s piano suite “Pictures at an Exhibition,” which Emerson, Lake and Palmer adapted and recorded as well. In that post, I also promised to update you on my idea for the surroundings for the centre piece “soon”. I could have done so because I finished th...
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37 pieces of quilting advice in exactly three words each

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A while ago, I shared a collection of three-word pieces of quilting advice as a carousel post in Instagram. It was fun to think about quilting from that perspective for a change, considering everything that I feel is important – and condensing each thought into just three words. Below you see the original post. Note the bonus piece of advice, originally from Angela Walters, the Midnight Quilter: it is so good that it deserved to be included – though it is six words long. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Tilkunviilaaja (@tilkunviilaaja) Fellow quilters responded to the post and suggested more pieces of advice. From those suggestions, I picked four more that I felt weren’t properly represented in my original list: Here is the full list of all 37 pieces of advice, all in exactly three words: Use your stash. Pick gadgets carefully. Invest in quality. Avoid bias edges. Avoid strict plans. Write things down. Never fudge seams....
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Quilted zipper bag called Zed

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Greetings from the Tilkunviilaaja studio, where I have produced the sixth quilted zipper bag of the year! The name of this zipper bag is Zed (or Zeta for the Finnish-speaking audience). This picture shows the pattern which inspired the name: Another inspiration for this name was the fact that even though I’ve made more than 360 zipper bags, not a single one so far has had a name beginning with Z. (This is small wonder because it is not a natively Finnish letter.) Zed is a product of my less orderly scrappy play. I found the other panel – the one with the shape that may remind one of the letter Z – from a scrap bag where I store orphan blocks and smaller, block-like beginnings, and turned a small pile of leftovers found on my cutting table into a sort-of-matching surface: If you read the recent post on my memorable quilt portraits, you may recognise the wooden pallet from the bonus photo. It provides an excellent background for bright-coloured quilted items! You may also noti...
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Splendid colour tips for quilters: Blue colour in quilts

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This is a modern quilting blog focused on patchwork, scrappy quilts, zipper pouches, quilted bags, colour theory, and practical quilting tutorials. This post is one of my Splendid colour tips series, where I share information to help you choose fabrics and colours for your quilts with more confidence. In this post, I’ll share My thoughts and helpful tips about using blue in quilts What to watch out for, and ways to use blue to effect in quilting Practical examples from my own quilts and quilted items Did you know that blue is the most common favourite colour for women AND men? You can take advantage of this fact if you are making quilted items to sell. Blue represents trust, safety, solidity, peacefulness and calm. Companies and banks often use blue as their brand colour, to create a sense of trustworthiness. You could also choose blue colour for a quilt that you want to give to a person you want to feel safe. Blue is a cool colour and it often seems to recede towards the ...
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