Tilkunviilaaja®

Today, I present to you the fourth zipper bag finish since I decided to reach my average number of zipper pouches made per year. This one is called Zebra Crossing / Suojatie, and if you read on, you will learn why. This is the main side of the Zebra Crossing pouch: See how light-hearted it looks somehow! At the time of the photo shoot, this path was the only spot in our garden that caught any sun. Happily, the autumn leaves on the path matched the colour of the zipper bag. Going back in time a bit. These are my mindlessly sewn, scrappy blocks that I sewed as an interim project – and you can probably spot a few that eventually became part of the Zebra Crossing pouch: Somehow, I’m not completely satisfied with this set because so many of them look a little glum. I suspect that several of these – since they do not really meet my visual requirements – will be end up as a bottom part of a future zipper pouch. And that is the silver lining in my slightly disappointing results. T...

Today, I have the pleasure of introducing the 14th zipper bag finish of the year. There is a good reason why I named it Lofty John / Korkea John (continue reading and you will learn exactly why): In the picture, the Lofty John quilted zipper bag is posing in the nearby woods where I took a short walk last week, in the middle of a working day! The sun was shining and it felt almost unlawful to sit inside. This time of the year one doesn’t even have to think about getting burnt at midday. In October, you don’t need sunscreen in Finland (and you are lucky to see the sun at all). When I was making this zipper pouch, I managed to leave my comfort zone – I used free-motion machine quilting and ran a stipple quilting pattern on parts of the surface. This was because I was bothered by not having dared to test my stippling skills to complete the quilting on one of the Early Days zipper bag panels. Somehow, straight stitching seemed a better idea for the focus squarish parts and the wi...

Yay, it is still possible for me to reach the goal of sewing at least the average number of zipper bags this year! This recent finish, Early Days / Alkutaival is a step towards that goal: This was my starting point, more or less: The panels look underwhelming, don’t they? I found the upper piece amongst my resources (my scrap stash) and for some reason, it has only been partly quilted. I don’t remember why I made it in the first place – though I have a vague recollection that I put the piece together very quickly. But why would I start quilting it and not finish? No idea. Even though I had started the quilting with quite nice-looking stippling, I didn't want to return to my discomfort zone of free-motion quilting. That is why the rest of the quilting on that panel are straight-stitched curves. The other zipper bag panel got one of my favourite designs, intersecting arcs, though the placement of the arcs is different from my usual choice. If you want to know more about th...

One more finish to share in my quilt studio diary! Here is my most recent finish, the Holiday Mood / Lomatunnelma quilted zipper bag. The name doesn’t refer to my feelings by the way: the zipper pouch just reminds me of holiday moods. Here it poses on a different garden chair than my usual choices: You may remember that the previous post on the Little Black zipper pouch showed the ancient but picturesque garden bench. This chair is of a later vintage but thanks to spending most of its life outdoors, it had lost almost all its colour. Because it had not aged as gracefully as that bench, I decided to refinish it this spring, and now it looks almost as good as new. To keep better track of my quilt bag photos, I always name one side of the zipper bag as “the other side,” which means that the other side is the representative side. Usually both sides do please my eye rather equally, though. This is “the other side” of Holiday Mood: The above picture shows the underside of the hex...

Today, my quilt studio diary entry concentrates on a recent zipper bag finish. I gave it a Finnish name first, “Pikkumusta,” which translates directly into “Little Black”. But you may not know that the Finnish word means a little black dress, not anything else that might be black – we just save one word. So, here’s the Little Black quilted zipper bag, basking in the sun. Do you think that cat near the lower edge has closed her eyes because of the sunshine? One in-progress photo first. I took a picture of the zipper bag panels after I’d quilted but not yet trimmed them. And you know what: I didn’t remember to photograph the trimmed pieces! Both panels conveniently featured a scrap showing a round shape (they are really Christmas tree baubles), which inspired me to run a spiral of stitches on the surfaces. It is my second favourite way to quilt zipper bags. By the way, I’ve shared my 21 easy quilting patterns that I choose from when quilting small patchwork surfaces such as z...

This quilt project saw its first public appearance in June, when I shared what was on my sewing table just then. It’s fascinating that I’d written this when I only had ten blocks ready: “My vision is to sew the nine-patch blocks together somewhat at random – only creating pools of colour that flow across the quilt surface.” – When you see the picture of the finished quilt top, you can see if I achieved that vision! In my July greetings from the sewing table, I was completely taken by this project. This is what I said: “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.” In that post, I described the process of making these blocks and shared several p...