Tilkunviilaaja®

Now, let’s see if I can come up with enough to say about the photos of 9-patches that I plan to share today. Ever since I finished the quilted Rumba bag and bound and finished the Maxim quilt, I've been able to focus on that project wholeheartedly. I've been working my way through my many containers of leftover fabric pieces (they hold resource pieces, not scraps) and pulling out everything that's large enough to yield at least one 2" square. Quite often I find pieces large enough for me to cut three squares but not four. Why is that? It’s so inconvenient because I need two sets of four squares for each block. Or alternatively, just one square because every 9-patch gets either a dark or a light centre square, and it's never of the same fabric as the other squares in that block. Around the centre I sew four lighter and four darker squares. 9-patches usually turn out looking rather nice, especially after I’ve pressed the block. I avoid making ugly ones,...

You may have read about my quest to find the perfect binding for this quilt – if not, here’s the post. You may not agree with my choice, but I’m happy. Here she is: the Maxim quilt sewn of X blocks: The finish makes me even happier than identifying the binding fabric! I keep track of all my quilty makes and it is so satisfying to be able to add the entry when an item is finished. The sunny pictures of the Maxim quilt make me happy too: it feels that a quilt doesn’t get properly represented if the celebratory finishing photos are shot when the sun isn’t shining. And summer sun makes the colours look perfect, don’t you think: This quilt is the 98th that I’ve finished since I made my first quilt in 1995 (note that I didn’t make another quilt until 2009 when I launched into quilting for real). It is the 641st quilted item that I’ve finished since I started blogging in November 2009, and the 54th whose name begins with the letter ‘M’. You can see I’m a sucker for s...

It’s great that I got my X blocks quilt back from Töölön Tilkkupaja's longarm quilting! If you thought that the quilt top looked nice, you will love it now that it’s been quilted! The next thing that a quilted quilt needs is a binding. I always make my own bindings, so my next step started with a search through my sizable stash: I was sure that I would find the right binding fabric easily. Not so! I ended up auditioning at least a dozen choices. This picture shows two picks that I was pretty sure about: I thought that the dark grey fabric would be perfect, but it was only “nearly right”. The uppermost, barely visible fabric is a pale purple Kaffe Fassett. Again, almost there but just a little blah. The middle one I picked because it looked weird enough for me to hope that it would surprise me and be great – but it wasn't. Here you can see a peek of a peach-coloured fabric that I was also hoping to prove surprising: Instead, it was the worst fit of all the fab...

In my previous post less than a week ago, I introduced a surprise project – and now the project is finished! I wanted to see if I could create as nice a zippered bag as I’d done a few years ago. Here are the two bags side by side: Sliver/Lastu on the left and the new Rumba shoulder bag on the right – you decide how they compare. For me, they look surprisingly similar on these sides, and are equal in charm. Before I share more photos of the finished Rumba bag, here are a few in-progress shots. First, one surface piece when quilted: And the other piece after quilting: Although I have many other go-to quilting patterns, easy enough to do and suitable for smaller surfaces that I quilt on my domestic sewing machine, I decided to use the same pattern that I used on the Sliver bag. I got the idea for this quilting pattern of intersecting arcs from my long-time IG friend Alfhild @alborve and it has become my favourite. Where the two arcs intersect, a crosshatch patte...

Since I was in my teens, I’ve been careful to stop every envious thought that enters my mind before they take up residence. Over the years, this has become an automatic reaction, with one exception. The one exception is my former quilting self. It is surprising how often I look at a pleasing item that I have made and secretly wish I could make something like that. Maybe confessing to this makes me seem deranged, but that is how my thoughts work sometimes. Sorry! This week’s surprise project started like that because I’ve been envying the Sliver/Lastu zipper bag lately. Long-time readers may remember seeing my original Sliver/Lastu zipper bag from year 2020. Some weeks ago, I came across it and set it to hang on a doorknob while I figured out what to do about the bag (to keep or gift or try to sell). I’ve been seeing the bag several times every day since then because that door is across the upstairs landing. And I’ve been so envious of my previous success! See if you...