Tilkunviilaaja®

Are you planning to make your first quilt – or perhaps dream of making one? Go for it, but please don’t make the three mistakes that I made! When I decided to sew my first proper-sized quilt in the mid-1990s, I made three big mistakes - but I was able to finish the quilt: Be smarter than I was and learn from my early experiences! Mistake 1: Cutting with scissors. In the mid-1990's, quilting became visible in the sewing magazines that I subscribed to. I fell in love with the modern, colourful look and decided to make a quilt for our new bedroom. But because I wasn’t sure if quilting was going to be a lasting thing for me, I also decided NOT to buy any special tools. They were expensive, and I already had the cost of fabric to consider. And anyway, what was the use of investing in tools that I might only use for one project? So, what did I end up doing? I’d selected a relatively quick pattern based on strips. Meaning, it would have been a quick make if I’d had pr...

Happy Saturday, and welcome to meet the latest make from my sewing studio! This is a modern quilting blog focused on patchwork, scrappy quilts, zipper pouches, quilted bags, colour theory, and practical quilting tutorials. Today’s entry in the quilt studio diary introduces a finished project: a quilted zipper bag called Tribal. Dear Daughter suggested the name because she saw in something tribal-like in the pattern in the narrow strip just below the half-square triangles on this side: I can also share two process pictures. First, the surfaces just after I’d put them together. You can see that they aren’t even properly pressed yet: All of the half-square triangles in the surfaces must be leftovers from making the Busy quilt, for which I’ve also released a pattern. A week after taking that photo, I had quilted the surfaces and trimmed them to size. I chose intersecting curves for quilting pattern. I got the pattern idea originally from my IG friend Alfhild @alborve and it is ...

I’ve made more than 360 zipper bags during my 16+ blogging years. Over the years, I’ve learned so many things – not only about sewing zipper bags, but how to use scraps, colour, and contrast, where to place the focus pieces on the surface, and the best ways to quilt them to effect. Some of the learnings came because my methods and techniques developed. Others I learned through mistakes, or by reflecting on why I liked or did not like one creation or another. For example, I’ve realised that scrappy zipper bags can benefit from having visual order, that value contrast matters more than matching fabrics, and that the density of quilting will change how a bag looks and feels. I’ve also been surprised to learn how different people’s preferences are when it comes to size, shape, or colour. It’s liberating to know that a standard shape and size is not the only way to go! In this post, I will share my learnings – including one thing that can make your zipper bag look classily handmade in...

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...