Tilkunviilaaja®

The other day, I started thinking about the thing people call “an eye for colour”. Some people get compliments on their eye for colour, but I’ve also heard people claim that they don’t have one at all. Perhaps it’s more to do about recognising one’s preferences – or not knowing what one likes? If you aren’t certain about your eye for colour and would like develop it, you may find it difficult to know how to start. Here’s a solution for you: seven quilting habits that you can adopt – and develop your colour sense at the same time. At a glance, the 7 quilting habits are: 1. Know your own ways 2. Think about what you really like 3. Forget about pleasing someone else 4. Stop comparing your work to others 5. Face your fears 6. Give yourself encouragement 7. Return to your successes 1. Know your own ways For a long time, I thought that there was only one correct way to sew a quilt. I thought one had to pick a block pattern and choose the fabrics, then one would sew as m...

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...

Welcome to my quilt studio! Today, I’ll share two quilting projects that I’ve recently been working on in my sewing space. Project 1: X blocks into a quilt top First, here are almost all the X blocks that I needed for my latest quilt project. See the clips that hold them together? I got a box full of number and letter clips from my friend Soile for my birthday, to use for tagging blocks. There is one of each number from zero to ten, and then alphabets. That’s why I had to be a little creative when using the clips to mark how many blocks there were in each stack. L3 is obviously 13. That was easy enough, but when I’d made all the blocks I needed, I really had to stretch my creativity! Z0 = ten; LT = eleven; I4 = 14, and the upside down J together with 5 make fifteen. I got the idea for these blocks when sewing different X blocks for the “Swiftly Flew the Long-eared Herald” quilt. It took me a couple of tries to get the measurements right (I can see this from the pho...

When I started making this list, I wasn’t sure that I could come up with enough items, but as soon as I’d written down one, the rest came easily. Some of these 10+1 things may be familiar to you – they definitely aren’t secrets! Most items on this list are things that I wish someone had explained to me when I was a beginner quilter! So here they are: 10+1 things about quilting that you did not know – or at least haven’t stopped to think about in a while. 1. Fabric won’t mind if you do use it wrong side out. Because fabric has a “right side” and a “wrong side,” it takes me a bit of mental effort to consider using it the wrong side up. But if the wrong side of the fabric looks better for a project, we are allowed to use it that way. Sometimes the wrong side just looks better with the other fabrics. Ugly fabrics, for example! Or, the wrong side may be just that much lighter in value than its neighbours, and achieve good contrast. Here’s an example - both the lower two blocks in th...