Allietare, Mystery Quilt 2015

Christmas is fast approaching and that means it's time for Bonnie Hunter's annual mystery quilt.
This will be my fifth mystery quilt of Bonnie's I have done.
This year it is called Allietare and you can find all the information here if you want to join in.
For those of you who follow my blog you will know I adore the quilting process but I love piecing too and doing a Bonnie quilt always helps me become better at this, not to mention that you get a beautiful quilt at the end of it.

As always I like to use whatever is in my stash so these are the colours I have chosen.
I've not strayed too far from Bonnie's choices swapping the golds for green and the reds have a more terracotta feel to them.

Normally I would have used my easy angle ruler to make the HSTs but this time I decided to use a method I have not tried before .  The magic 8.

The tutorial I used gave an update suggesting adding an extra 1/4" to the starting square.  I did this and look at all the excess I had to trim off.  I guess my piecing is more accurate than I think.  what a waste!

Here is my little pile of HSTs all ready to go.  I am making half the amount suggested by Bonnie.
The full sized finished quilt will be too big to fit on my frame.
Every week Bonnie will be doing a link up for everyone doing the mystery.  You can find it here.
its fun to see everyones progress so make sure you visit.

I'm just going to end my post with something else Bonnie -related.  This my tumbler quilt which was the leader and ender challenge for 2015.
I started in July and finished it just before Allietare started. My tumblers finish at 2" in the quilt.

I designed the tumbler flower blocks to frame the main piece.  They are made from appliqued 1 1/2" tumblers with a hexagon in the middle.

Love my tumbler quilt and thank you to Bonnie for another great challenge.
Wonder what it will be next year?
Thanks for visiting my blog today.
Rhainon.

Penelope's Elephant Baby Quilt

Hi there
This is my latest finish.  a baby quilt commissioned by my sister for a friend of ours Sharon who became a Grandma( to Penelope) for the first time last week.
I love making quilts for babies so was very happy to be given free rein with the design.  The brief was new mummy Hollie loves orange and elephants.
Fantastic, orange was not a colour I had a lot of in my stash but luckily I was able to stock up at the quilt show back in September.

 This is my drawing I worked from.

The elephant and balloons are raw edge machine applique and I used bondaweb.

 Prairie points were perfect to frame the little elephant.

 Borders added.....

....and onto the frame for quilting.  I used one layer of Hobbs 80/20

 Love the stripey binding

My gift to the new baby was some crochet. I love making clothes for babies, they're so cute!

This has been a busy month for me. I finished a customer quilt and I'm working on another commission which will be going to the USA.
I WILL be ready to start Bonnie Hunter's mystery quilt at the end of the month.
Looking forward to it.
Thanks for visiting my blog today.
Happy sewing til next time
Rhianon.

Quilted Vintage Tablecloth

A while back I joined a group on Facebook called Quilting Vintage. It's all about quilting old embroidered tablecloths, runners, doillies and handkerchiefs.
Taking something old and beautiful, giving it new life and making it even more beautiful.

A lot of beautiful work on that page and I wanted to try my hand at it.

After scouring the local charity shops, I found these at £1 each.

Couldn't wait to get home and load up the frame.  I started with the pale mint green one which has pretty hand embroidery.

I didn't really have a plan so off I went.  I started with the embroidered corner motifs and then moved down to the middle.

A flower in the center seemed a good starting point.

I then rolled the frame back and filled in the background with pebbling, eventually moving down and finishing the final two corner motifs.

Its all freehand, unmarked and was a lot of fun.

These are a brilliant and inexpensive way to practice quilting.  I'm thinking what to do with the next one now........
Thanks for visiting today
Happy stitchin'
Rhianon.

Alison's Shashiko Quilt

The second customer quilt I worked on recently was this one.
Beautifully sewn by Alison, this quilt came to me already semi - quilted.
It had been half sewn by another long armer but she was completely stumped by the stitching in the square blocks and left them completely unquilted.

 In the blocks with the round motifs, she simply stippled the bits she could and left the rest untouched.
The sashings had a dense squiggly line on them.  Needless to say Alison was very disappointed to get her quilt back, half done, especially as she wanted to hang it on a wall, making the unquilted parts all saggy and pooky as we say here in Scotland.
This is what I did with it:

 How one of the blocks looked before quilting....

 ....and after.

 This is all continuous line work.

Next onto the the round motifs.  I simply echoed the shapes to give some definition .
I would have done something other than stippling but at least the center of the block is anchored now and lies flat.

 Again, more continuous line work, echoing inside the white hand stitching.

 Slowly, slowly here as I didn't want to sew over the white stitching.

 It's always good to take photos as you work, I realised here I had missed a bit!  Can you see it?

I did fix it.

This is the back of the quilt.

Alison was over the moon with what I did and is very happy she can finally use her quilt which she spent so much time and effort on..
I thoroughly enjoyed working on it.
Happy quilting til next time.
Rhianon.