Tilkunviilaaja®

When you've been blogging about quilts for as long as I have, some photographs stay with you long after the quilts themselves have moved on. Since November 2009, I've shared nearly two thousand blog posts and taken at least ten times as many photos of my quilts, scraps, quilted items, and my scrappy quilting process. This collection of most memorable quilt portraits is not a list of my best quilts. Instead, these are the five quilt photos that earn a special place in my memory. And then there's one photograph that doesn't feature a quilt, but a series of luggage tags that I make of scraps. I can’t tell why I like this photo so much! Consider it a bonus photo on my list. Here are the 5 quilt portraits and one surprise favourite photo of quilted items, and the stories behind them. 1 – “Heading North” on a pier For more than 20 years, my family has had a favourite holiday place – a rented cottage on a Finnish lake. Many summers, we’ve stayed there for a week or two, ...

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 ...

Happy Thursday, and it’s time to have a look at 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, I’ll share a recently finished project: a quilted zipper bag called May Day. This zipper bag got that name because I finished it in time to enjoy the May Day celebrations which are a big thing in Finland. I love the spring! Since I started blogging, I’ve grown to love the months that offer a lot of daylight even more than I used to because my makes look so much nicer in well-lit photos. Before looking at the other side of the May Day zipper bag, let’s go back in time to the moment when I’d built a small, rectangular surface and realised that I could make it more interesting. I found a large half-square triangle, sewn goodness knows when, and cut it mercilessly in half. The pieces looked good for making new corners for my original surface: In the photo, you ma...

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...

I’ve shared many tips and how-tos lately because I love to be helpful. I hope that you readers have found my posts helpful! Today, though, I’m going to share the quilting projects that I’m working on in my sewing space. If you tend to have several projects in progress, you’ll be able to relate to this studio diary post. Here’s what’s currently on my table (and slightly off it): Unfinished quilt projects Two – no, three! – quilt projects are waiting to be completed. The first one is my flimsy that combines Xs and four-patches-in-squares. It's waiting to be taken to long-arm quilting. After I took its sunny pictures earlier this month, I folded it and set it down on a sofa. Now I see that it’s accidentally been taken in with two folded quilts, turning them into a sort of pillow. It will have to be re-pressed after this treatment! The second unfinished project is the one with Kaffe Fassett squares surrounded with a lot of scrappiness. I've shared the beginning of th...

In my previous studio diary post, my scrappy quilt top was starting very slowly. Then it happened: after the first, slowest-to-make blocks were done, the rest of the quilt came together in just a few days. The four-patches in squares were particularly fast to sew. I’ve noticed that after the first 25 blocks, the process usually becomes much smoother. There are fewer mistakes in cutting and trimming, for example. This is very noticeable in my way of working – I cut pieces for a few blocks at a time, not everything at once. With all the blocks done, the only thing left was to design them into an orderly layout and sew them into a quilt top. This time it was not easy to identify dark, mid-value and light blocks because almost all of them were mid-value. They also had the white corners in common (except for the bunny block). Well, I ended up identifying the very darkest ones and the lightest ones and decided to organise the rest by colour somehow. I did think carefully about the ...