A trivet and its tale

Yesterday I made this trivet - it took all morning, afternoon and well into the evening, full disclosure is important. It is a 10.5" square, the patchwork piece is about 6.25" square. It is made with Liberty Lifestyle quilting cottons, an Architextures print for the background, and navy Essex linen with an insulbright batting to allow it to protect the table from heat. There were a lot of things that led to this my choices for this trivet.

First, the inner patchwork is taken from the pattern for the Sweet Trips Embroidery Pouch in Ayumi Takahashi's new book Patchwork, Please! but I made the cover panel a little smaller. I have been enjoying this book.



That is a spool of aurafil thread, the one that I used to quilt the navy Essex linen, mostly for scale.

My second inspiration for this trivet was Hadley's version of the Sweet Trips Embroider Pouch which you can read about here on her blog, Flying Blind With a Rocket Cycle. Every time I saw her progress I wanted to make and have that patchwork panel. So I basically copied Hadley, I am sure she knows that is because her idea was fantastic.



A long while back I won some of the beautiful Liberty Lifestyle quilting cottons from my friend Sarah who blogs at Sew Me. I have long been wanting to just make something for me from those beauties.



The Give Me Liberty sew along that Krista, who blogs at Krista Stitched and Nicole, who blogs at Bold Goods are running has had me thinking of using the fabrics Sarah had sent me in the way that Hadley did to make the beautiful panel in my new book. I will link this up to the sew along, where more Liberty fabric projects can be found.

Last, that new to me, old to the world dining room table needs trivets, and I needed a break from making placemats.

I wish you all a great week, me included.

Best,

Leanne

SMS Giveaway - the winner

Thank you all for sharing your upcoming sewing plans with me and for entering my Sew Mama Sew giveaway. I had a difficult, hard week at work and the cheerful, inspiring comments that kept popping up on my phone really kept me smiling, when other things were not. So thank you again.

But there can be only one winner, and it is the lovely Lindsay who blogs at for the love of cotton.



Lindsay, the Glimma fat quarters will be in the mail to you on Monday - I hope you have fun with them. I do so love these fabrics, it is a good thing that I have another set for me too.



For the rest of the weekend, I will be playing with these Oakshott bits and pieces and making them into placemats, and there are some pickle dishes with my name on them too. And some bee blocks, working too hard gets in the way of sewing in a most annoying manner.

Enjoy Mother's Day tomorrow, I am planning to do just that.

Best,

Leanne

Glimma for Giveaway Day

Welcome, it is the time for the Sew Mama, Sew Giveaway Day week again. I have this bunch of fat quarters of Glimma by Lotta Jansdotter for you.



*** The giveaway is now closed, thank you for your interest.***To enter to win, leave me a comment and if you like, let me know what quilt or sewing projects are on your list to make this spring or that you wish were on your list. For a second entry, follow my blog in some manner (be a follower, via bloglovin, as a subscription, by email, or whatever - there are buttons on the right if you are new here) and let me know that you do and how you follow in a second comment.

This giveaway is open internationally and will close on Friday May 10 at 6 pm MST. After that I will draw the winner using the random number generator.

Please, please, put your email in your comment or make sure it is connected to your profile. If it is not you will not be the winner. I will draw another.

One more time, this giveaway has been open for one hour and I already have a number of comments without emails attached to profiles. Last time, please make sure your email is in your profile or in your comment (leave it like this: name [at] provided [dot] com or whatever and the email strippers will not get it for email lists) or if I draw you you will not win. 

I will not be replying to comments for this giveaway but I will be reading them and thank you for sharing your sewing plans which always inspire me. I will be off entering the other giveaways linked at Sew, Mama, Sew. I expect you will be too.

Oh and if you are not familiar with this huge giveaway week, there are five catagories of giveaways, each in a separate May 6 post at Sew, Mama, Sew - be sure to check out all of them, bloggers from all over the world participate.

***This giveaway is now closed, thank you for your support.****
Best,

Leanne

Fire - a mini quilt

Fire is the third mini quilt I have made as part of the Four in Art group. Fire is also the theme this round, which I picked. Fire is a 12" square mini quilt made with navy Essex Linen and multiple strips of Oakshott shot cotton. That picture above is actually the best representation of how dark the navy is in real life - it is almost as hard to photograph well as the Oakshotts.



I quilted her with navy Aurafil 50wt thread and also with a variegated red/orange/purple Superior Threads King Tut 50 wt. The King Tut is thicker than the Aurafil, despite them being the same labeled weight, must be a different country thing.



The picture above is before I washed and dried her. There is a subtle addition of texture from the wash which I like.

Over time I have wanted to make efforts to quilt the elements, which is why I picked fire as the theme this round. I made Fire by cutting a bunch of strips and thinking about how fire felt and how its colours looked. That was the whole plan - not very complicated.



This picture made me very happy. The angle and the lighting made the Oakshots glow and the quilting seems to lift the fire off the quilt, sort of three dimensionally. It feels like fire to me. A friendly, life supporting fire, not a terrible out of control dangerous fire.



When I picked the navy linen, I was thinking about a campfire in the night or a star in space. I wanted the quilting to represent the light and the warmth of the fire. The swirls are mostly for fun but maybe you see the impact of the warmth, swirling the air, warming beyond the fire.



That picture is before I sandwiched and quilted her. Again, it is as close to the real colours as I could manage.



There you can see the glow of the Oakshots as the morning sun hit her. These fabrics are perfect to represent fire.



Fire is a powerful thing, and I suppose it is rather silly to try to represent this amazing element of nature in a tiny quilt.



But, can you feel it?

My friends in the Four in Art group are posting their mini quilts inspired by the theme fire today too, Elizabeth at Occasional Piece, Rachel at Life of Riley and Betty on flickr - I hope you check them out.

Best,

Leanne

Whachadoing? April's projects and the WIP for the week.

There is a mosaic of what I made in April - not that much sewing happened this month. Mostly pickle dish units, I am up to 106 of 200. A lot of my time in April was taken with the FAL, I so enjoyed reading about everyone's wonderful finishes (you can too, anytime you want some inspiration go here). And I have a new family project that is a 6 hour highway drive away so I spent several days there.

Oh, and there is a little mini quilt for my Four in Art group that I will show off tomorrow - which is why I am sharing this today.

My plan, the WIP, the #widrn ("what I am doing right now"), so to speak, the things I will post on Instagram when I do sew, with dark and often not great iphone pictures, what will that be this week? Oh, and I am @shecanquilt on Instagram (and Twitter too - although I find this one harder to embrace and seldom read it or tweet) if you want to find me there.



Well, first and foremost are more pickle dish units and maybe I will cut some backgrounds and piece some blocks.



I need placemats. We have a new to us, but old to the world, fancy dining room table. It needs placemats to protect it from my family as I like the wood so much that I cannot bear to cover it with a table cloth all the time and we do actually eat in our dining room due to lack of room in the kitchen. I think I will use those mug rugs I made last year as inspiration and get out some linen and some Oakshotts.



Finally, this week I want to get back to my Q2 FAL list. That low volume quilt is on my mind - I want to be using it this summer at the beach. I am going to get out my EPP and finish off the circles, maybe a movie is in order so that I can sit and do that.

I am going to link this post to a bunch of places, as each of them opens this week. Lynne at Lily's Quilts Fresh Sewing Day, Lee at Freshly Pieced and the Needle and Thread Network. You can link too or you can go to each of these link groups for inspiration, they never disappoint. Buttons are all over on the right sidebar.

It have been sitting here watching the morning snow come down while I write this. A heat wave (well for us, +18 - +24C) is predicted to start on Thursday. But today, snow. I best get off to work then.

Best,

Leanne