Tilkunviilaaja®

Oh my, writing today’s splendid tips felt like a real challenge because I use solid-coloured fabrics the least in the world. However, after some deep research into my quilting history, I uncovered quite a few examples, which I hope will be helpful for you! Read on and you will learn what to watch out for when using solid-coloured fabrics in quilts, and get tips for using solids with success. I will also share my thoughts on fabrics whose colour is “nearly solid”! Why I don’t often use solids I never get an urge to buy solid fabrics because colourful, patterned fabrics attract me so much more. When I look at my stash, at least 90% of it are patterned fabrics. The only (nearly) solids I consciously buy are whites, blacks and greys. Ever since I was a child, I’ve liked patterns. For example, when I was around seven years old, I had a snake-skin patterned coat, plaid pants, striped socks and a differently striped shirt – and I would wear all of them together. And I loved flower patt...

It’s time again to share some treasures from my quilty archives with you. Today, I will look back to 2012 when I created a quilted wall textile for my husband for his birthday. He plays the guitar and loves the Finnish custom-made Versoul guitars by Kari Nieminen. In other words, I made my husband a guitar: The official name of this quilted piece is Pasi’s Versoul Henry Gold Leaf Custom. The guitar picture on it is based on a photo that I found back then on the Versoul website. I didn’t want to infringe on Kari Nieminen’s copyright for the photo, so before I even started, I requested and got the permission to use the photo for this purpose. The making of this wall textile I took a screenshot of the picture and pixelated it into as many pixels as I had calculated I could manage when each pixel would be represented by an approximately 2” x 2” fabric square. Then I printed out the pixelated image. Luckily for me, this was an easy picture: black for the background and a variety ...

This is a modern quilting blog focused on patchwork, scrappy quilts, zipper pouches, quilted bags, colour theory, and practical quilting tutorials. This post is one of my Quilt studio diary series, where I introduce my recently finished quilts and quilted items and share some thoughts about the process. Today’s finished creation is Community Garden / Siirtolapuutarha, a square, scrappy, quilted wall textile that features beautiful Kaffe Fassett precuts: Let’s go back in time to February, when I was still working on the quilt top. I shared photos of the whole process in my How it started – and how it’s going post back then. The post closed with an image of the completed scrappy centre piece, which reminded me of Modest Mussorgsky’s piano suite “Pictures at an Exhibition,” which Emerson, Lake and Palmer adapted and recorded as well. In that post, I also promised to update you on my idea for the surroundings for the centre piece “soon”. I could have done so because I finished th...