Tilkunviilaaja®

A few weeks ago, I came across a blog post where a quilter shared a finish. She mentioned being vaguely unhappy with it even though there wasn’t anything wrong with the blocks and the design. I’m pretty sure that most of us have experienced something similar. Looking at a quilty finish and thinking “this may be okay, but I am so done with this: never again”! Of my around 640 quilting projects, these are five that I would not re-make. I’ve analysed the core reasons and shared my learnings. Spectrolite: Problems all along Many years ago, I enjoyed a fun sew-together Saturday with my quilting guild. One of us shared a clever sew-and-cut method for creating a quilt block. I’d seen a quilt that she had made and oh, it looked so good! I wanted to make something as nice as that one! Because I didn’t quite understand value contrast back then, many blocks had too much of it while others didn’t have enough. I used patterned fabrics which read darker than I thought. But the begi...

This month’s look back doesn’t see very far because I’m sharing rather a recent finish, the Chartres quilt. I introduced it in this blog in October last year (in 2025) when I was still blogging in Finnish. I thought that you might like to see it and know a little bit more about it! Chartres is cute because almost all of its fabrics are super pretty! (Note to self: use your pretty fabrics; it’s worth it!) What's behind the name "Chartres"? You may want to know why I named this quilt Chartres. I did consider inventing a name that would have been related to the other quilt that inspired me. My friend Soile had sewn a gorgeous quilt called Erica, and it might have been nice for the name to give a nod towards it, but I just could not come up with anything. This quilt was nearly called Eeny Meeny, which would at least have had the same initial letter, but then I realised that the nine-patch blocks reminded me of cathedral windows. And a specific cathedral at that. ...

A couple of days ago I came across a small piece that I’d sewn of half-square triangles. It was a small project to work on at our summer place where I only do hand-sewing – if I sew at all. I had the HSTs with me and sewed them together by hand. Nothing particularly exciting about that find, really. Until I happened to see a picture of “what was going on 10 years ago,” with that piece in it. I’d sewn it together a decade ago, thinking that it would become a quilted item – and it’s still in that same state. This got me thinking about how long things sometimes take in quilting. At least in my quilting. And because I have a lot of material in my blog, it didn’t take long to find examples to share with you. No progress in ten years Almost exactly ten years ago, in July 2016 I had hand-sewn the binding on my Heading North quilt and taken one of my most memorable quilt-finish photos of it. When I was sewing the flying geese blocks for that quilt, I got a whole bunch of bonus half-...

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,...