Tilkunviilaaja®

Hello hello! Welcome to have a peek in my sewing studio! Lately, I’ve been busy sewing patchwork surfaces into quilted zipper bags, and this post introduces the first of those finishes. I’ve called it Legato, which is a music term meaning “tied together” – that the notes are to be played or sung smoothly without a silence between one note and another. I used to play the piano in my childhood and youth, so the notation and the term became familiar to me. Legato felt like the right name choice because of the way the petals of the coneflower blend into the neighbouring reds in this surface. The other side of the Legato quilted zipper bag is constructed in a similar way – around a focal fabric piece – but the orientation is horizontal: Both surfaces are a rarity for me because I built them using the quilt-as-you-go method. The surface ends up looking as if it has not been quilted though it has, and I’m not sure how I feel about the look. In some earlier projects, I have added qu...

If you’ve been following my work for a while, you’ll know that I like to share my own quilted makes in Tilkunviilaaja’s Instagram. It’s a pleasure to share more details of their stories here as well. The most recent finish is a zipper bag which I named Quiddity (or Olemus in Finnish). It is also the first zipper pouch that I’ve sewn this year. A milestone! I put together the surfaces quickly, to have a project for an upcoming quilting day with friends whom I first got to know in social media – through their blogs or Instagram accounts. And because I wanted a quick make, I just took whatever fabrics that I found on or at arm’s length from my sewing table and made “scrap-in-a-box” squares. The squares end up being of different sizes, but I trim them so that several of them are of the same width or length. Then they can be sewn together as columns (or as rows), to make a surface that is of suitable size for a zipper bag. I’ll have to share an image of another project to show you...