A Finish! YAY!!

Hey Mum! I finally finished sewing down the binding on this one!!

It's my Old Red Barn Co. Flickr (round 5) Pinwheel quilt-along quilt. It measures 72" x 54" and is the largest quilt I have ever finished!!!

Un.be.lieveable!

This is the back, there's a piece of every print from the front and some old Philip Jacobs fabric I had plenty of yardage of.

I love this photo of it!

I've decided to tackle my Mod Sampler top next. All I have to do is piece the back, quilt and bind. lol. I think I'll quilt it straight across the width, about an 1" apart.

Well, that's yer lot! I need to take out of the oven the newest addition to our fave snacks, spring rolls! And before anyone kindly asks for the recipe, they came out of a box!!

Cheerio for now,

x Mandy

Doll Quilt Swap #10

I have always loved this fabric from Anna Maria Horner, 'Cathedral' from her Good Folks line. I love the simple duality of the pattern, circles and diamond stars or four pointed flowers. So, when I managed to purchase a yard of this I decided to use it as my inspiration for my DQS10.

I started to pull fabrics pieces from my stash but found I needed to do a bit of shopping! Dear oh dear what a bore that was.....not!!! lol It was tricky finding pinks that I was comfortable using, but I somehow managed!

So, this is where I started, grey HAD to be the background, and I decided that using 3 different greys could look interesting in the border. But it needed a bit of colour too, but not so much that your eye would be drawn away from the main pattern. So a thin scrappy border was the way, but in what colour?

These Anna Maria Horner 'Innocent Crush' blues provided the perfect answer. They blend so beautifully with the greys without detracting from the pinks and purples.

Next comes a little stitching in the ditch quilting, in the borders, then some hand quilting on the solids. I haven't quite decided on the colour, but maybe pink, actually I might have some already from another swap quilt.

I'm really quite enamoured with this one, even though I didn't get my stitches as close to the edge on the ovals as I'd have liked. I thought about washing the quilt when it's finished, to soften the edges of the ovals, but my DQS Flickr pals mostly say no! I'll make a final decision about that when the binding is on. Which is going to be my original fabric inspiration, of course!!!

After I finish this quilt, I've got another Doll Swap Quilt to think about! This time for the 'Down Under Doll Quilt Swap'! It will be fun to swap with 'locals'!!! One being my blogging pal Rachael of the Blue Mountain Daisy blog. You should check it out her blog, this lovely lass is not afraid of colour, and has made some stunning quilts.

Cheerio for now, and thanks for stopping by!

x Mandy

A little help, can make a big difference....

Go here to find out more.

Fabrics from Karen

Fabrics from Karen
Originally uploaded by mandalin18

A gift from the very generous Flickr friend. Karen posted a pic of the Kokeshi Doll fabric, which of course I commented on!!! She cryptically fm'd me saying 'watch your mailbox'. Imagine my utter surprise when all of this arrived.

Have no fear, I have a special thank you planned, hee hee, but I'm not telling, yet!!

x Mandy

More Fresh Modern Bee blocks

I really enjoyed working with the all the deep purple linen that Viv sent, so soft and floppy!! The print was also fun, with sparrows, hummingbirds and foliage, and the little bit of orange made for a striking combination. Other people in the bee were given the opposite quantities of the solid fabrics, and their printed calico had spiderwebs and grubs on it. It's sure to be an amazing quilt!!

Here are the blocks I made.

I fell off my non buying fabric wagon in January, but I've been a good fabric addict so far in February. Here's the new January additions to the stash. Oldies but goodies, and colours I have very few off in my stash. I can ALWAYS justify buying fabric!!


So........what is this pile then, well........you know how I said I wouldn't do any more quilt alongs until I'd finished some quilts! Well........I've fallen off that wagon too! But I do get to finally use my blue and green Amy Butler fabrics. I've had some of these since I started my stash!


This stack of lovelies is destined to be a Single Girl Quilt by Denyse Schmidt. I truly have always loved that quilt. So when I spied that a Support Group had emerged in Flickr and one of the three leading the way was Katy from I'm a ginger monkey blog fame, I just had too! And as the Flickr name suggests, it is a support group, a hand holding, you can do it group!

Not that it's a tricky quilt, so we've been told often, but there is a lot of preparation. Each finished block is huge at approx 22" squares, and made of 4 quarters, each quarter has around 8 different fabrics in an arc, so the whole block has a squarish circle in it. These circles then touch each other when the blocks are sewn together!!!! There are 31 pieces to the circle and the pattern calls for 36!?! No, I haven't read the pattern, it only arrived today. I think I'll read it, and note my questions and then ask my fellow Single Girl Quilters. I have to get some more plastic for the templates before I can start anyway. I didn't think I had enough, but now I'm sure. I hope I manage more than one block, I'll definitely keep you posted!!

Cheerio for now,

thanks for visiting!

x Mandy

I'm in the Fat Quarterly e-zine!

I felt overwhelmingly compelled to 'give it a go' for this Fat Quarterly Design Challenge. The brief was to design a 'cross' block using solids. I had so many idea's swarming around in my head I had to check myself. Lynne over at 'Lily's Quilts' explained K. I. S. S. a short while ago, Keep It Simple Stupid!!! That's exactly what I did when I designed this block.

So.....how can you make a simple cross block look new?

How about this!

My main thought was how the block would look multiplied in a quilt, and how could I make more crosses when they were! There still had to be a recognisable cross in the block, that didn't get lost, so I used a different colour palette for it. And I wanted to have as many colours as I could without it looking too busy, and to illustrate how solids can be dramatic, but subtle also. I have Aqua's galore so this seemed the obvious choice. The four corner squares make a whole jewelled tone square when the blocks are complied and the repeated longer aqua strips make the additional cross arms.

Like this...

I also put together a tutorial for the e-zine, which was also amazingly used. Hope I wrote it okay, I'm a little worried it doesn't read correctly, or I missed out a step, or the measurements are wrong. I hope it was checked. If anyone has any questions about the tutorial, please just ask!!

Goodness, what an exciting day that was!

Cheerio for now,

x Mandy

Issue 4 available soon

See that Cross block top left, that's mine!!! I'm oh so chuffed!

If you'd like a little peek before buying, check it out here.

I bought a subscription for Fat Quarterly, instantly at the beginning for Issue 1. I just knew with the likes of Katy, Tacha, Kate, John, Nova and Brioni running the show, it would be my kind of read, full of my kind of projects. It hasn't disappointed, every issue has been packed with fabulous, must do projects, big and small. I'll be renewing my subscription, it's cheaper and I'll never forget to go on-line and buy it!

So, you wanna know a bit more about the block, well I've got another post lined up for after the release date, which is the 27th January. Not a how to, but a how it came about!

Go take a look at the Fat Quarterly blog and flickr pages in the mean time.

Right, I really should go off to the land of nod.

Cheerio for now,

x Mandy