Patchwork USA by Heidi Staples: Book Review

I've just had the chance to review a lovely book that I've spotted coming on Instagram from talented author/designer Heidi Staples @fabricmutt.  She has such a cute zakka-style aesthetic and is always very generous sharing free patterns/tutorials on her blog.  Patchwork USA: 24 Projects For Your Handmade Journey is a road-trip inspired book of makes from the quick 'daytrip' style coasters, snap shot needlebook, to 'weekend getaways' e.g. Hobby Kit,  Color book and finally longer projects- 'Summer Vacation'- like quilts and pillows. 

It is a very pretty book to look through, the photography is so nicely done- clear, cute and with a lot of vintage props!  All the makes are straightforward, there's only one pattern piece which is a corner rounding template, and the enjoyment is in fabric selection and fussy cutting.  It's also a hardback so as it stays open easily and feels extra good in my hands! Let's take a look through first, then I'll show you what I made!

The opening pages are the usual tools and techniques and this is where you refer back to when making a zipper pouch, hand sewing hexagons etc.  Heidi's thoughts on fabric combinations are excellent and especially helpful if you get stuck putting fabrics together to achieve a particular look or using certain colours or prints.  It's very well written and easy to understand with lots of tips and tricks.

The projects all feature some little extra text touches. There's a Historical Marker note telling the story behind the project.  Design tips come under Scenic Route and  Rotary Club lists the fabric and cutting requirements.  Some projects have a Tour Guide section with helpful hints and also a Detour for any project variations.   I made the Penny Pouch, more about that later!

I love these little banners on the Curio Pocket, made with tiny flying geese!

There are three quilt projects, a mini and two larger quilts.  All are easy makes using simple shapes.

At the end of the book, there are some ideas for gifting your makes, playlists and even recipes.  Again, lovely extra touches.

Here's my Penny Pouch.  I used a mix of vintage fabrics from some squares that I was given, plus a few fussy cuts.  

It is a quick make, most of my time was spent arranging my fabrics for colour and print balance.  The zip was from one of my favourite shops, Rose Garden Patchwork.  The colours were just right.

You can just about see the Heather Ross Tiger Lily butterfly print that I chose for the lining.

It's definitely for my use!  The 'K' was from one of Ayumi's Lighthearted fabrics.

 Patchwork USA is a delightful book, a good picker-upper if you need a quick sewing fix or you're lacking in inspiration and a real pleasure to read.   A big thank you to Search Press for sending me a copy to review.

Oakshott and Alice Apple: Squares

Sometimes I need to go back to basics.  Ignore the pretties on Instagram, blogs and elsewhere and just do something simple and let the fabric do the talking.  This quilt top was made from a stack of Oakshott fat eights of Italy (kindly sent by Michael), a charm pack of 37 squares bought from Alice Apple and a few random light and vintage squares from my scraps.  144 x 4" squares in all, 

Organising rows and 'randomness'.

Chain piecing.

Nesting seams.

No bells or whistles, just lovely shimmering colours.  The Italy bundle was a great match for the vintage style colours of the Alice Apple squares,  a very 1970s palette and the silvery grey warp thread that runs through this range has a subtle shimmer.

A quick flick through one of my older inspiration books whilst I was taking these photos confirmed the happy marriage of simple shapes and bold patterns and colours.  These are all from Patchwork Simplified by Alice Timmins- a great source of vintage patchwork eye candy with English paper pieced maxi skirts and slightly disturbing toys.

The 1970s with its rather variable aesthetic (note the green long shag pile in the bottom pic, urgh!) was very much my decade.  Combos like this make me feel so at home.

Guesting at Quilt Story-Hexagon Handle Holder Tutorial

Today you will find me at Quilt Story,with a Holiday Tutorial starting the gift making season with an each project.  Heather and Megan have a great list of contributors- check them out here.

My tutorial is for a hexagon handle holder: a quick and easy make and perfect for scraps- especially those with a kitchen theme.  Let me know what you think over at  Quilt Story.

Modern Mini

Here is my entry to the Modern Mini competition, 'Vintage Notions'

This mini started with a quilt block that  I have been working on for the Sew Out Loud quilt-a-long run by Julianna and Joanna and a big thankyou goes out to them for letting me preview it now in this mini.  I wanted to show how one 12 inch block could easily be the starting point for a mini quilt.  I know not everyone has time to make every quilt block in a quilt-a long and any of the Sew- a -long quilt blocks or many other quilt blocks would lend themselves to a mini.
My inspiration was a vintage sewing basket .  I have a few of these that I pick up for a few pounds at car boot sales and keep vintage treasures in.  These baskets often make me think about their previous owners: what they sewed, where the scraps and buttons and threads have come from.

  Many of us are only able to sew and quilt because our skills have been taught to us and passed on by mothers, aunties and grandmothers.  You might be lucky enough to have a sewing box or spools and tools that belonged to a relative and they thought of you when it was time to pass them on.  Very little is new in quilting or sewing, we just reinvent, reinterpret what has gone before.  We can pass our skills on over the web as well as in person, I just love that about the internet, the sharing.  So this mini quilt celebrates all those things.  Vintage notions that we use; the buttons and thread, vintage notions: the ideas that inspire us to make something new.

The centre sewing basket block,  will be available to download from Monday 19th March, the spools will be shared with those attending Fat Quarterly Retreat in June-I am running a workshop about freezer paper, Y seams and spools and the quilt will act as a teaching aid/ security blanket to hide behind.  I bought my train ticket yesterday, I can't wait!

  Technical details: 23" wide, 22" tall.

Freezer paper pieced, rotary cut piecing and a bit of free piecing.

Machine quilted and a bit of hand quilting.

There is a rouleau loop at the top of the basket for all you dres makers out there and the odd vintage button here and there.

Mini quilt single binding tutorial here.

And a thankyou to Jennifer for coming up with and organising the Mini Modern comp, I have really enjoyed seeing the blog hop contributions and ideas.

The Camera Never Lies

I am normally up to date with my bee blocks but Amy's Ocotober Ringo Pie block slipped by the wayside.  Her theme was 'The Camera Shop'.   I have been saving images for a while, I was all ready to do a vintage Super Color Polaroid Land camera with a solid green polaroid coming out of it.  I drafted it, bought rainbow ribbon and kept trying to put time aside to work it through.  It never really appeared in my head, I had the concept but I couldn't visualise it and no fabric was talking to me.  Last week, a new idea crept in, fully formed, fabrics, details- I could see them all.

A vintage film canister, Kodak inspired.  I am lucky.  I have a great memory for colour.  The biggest swatch board is in my head. Unfortunately, once I think of a fabric or a colour, I then have to find it,  search round the zillions of different places where I store fabric.  Most of my stash is small pieces, half yards, fat quarters, scraps.  With this block, I pulled the fabric in minutes and unusually the vintage fabric is the background.

This could only be Amy's block.  She is an intensely creative person, her work has great colour and imagination.  Her personality comes through it as I think it does for us all.  You may not have met your blogging friends in person but you have seen their inner imagination and personality through their work.  

Fabrics- Vintage floral print, vintage green solid, Kona school bus with versacraft ink stamp, Sweetwater Authentic Newsprint, Suzuko Koseki text/number fabrics, Kona Brown, tiny squares of Denyse Schmidt's Katie Jumps Rope.  

 

Five Favourites

I saw this linky party at Suz's blog Patchworknplay and Mary's blog Mollyflanders-all you need to do is select some of your favourite fabrics.  I could not resist digging in my boxes to pull out my favourites- these are the ones that make me a little sentimental, I don't ever want them to end.   I do the same with gloves, t shirts, pjamas, I really need to get a grip and move on...

These are in no particular order, but first is this floral print by Sevenberry.  

I first saw this when Amy used to sell delicious stacks of handpicked selections of fabrics.  I bought an FQ then, then I found some more elsewhere earlier this year, and I haven't seen it since.  A great aqua and incredibly usable.

The next two are an old print by Kumiko Fujita.  Ayumi put a scrap of this in a parcel a while ago for me and I used it to make a bit of a breakthrough block for me- Vintage spools.  I found the aqua on Etsy- it was a random listing and I have just swapped with Tamiko for the peachy FQ.  

This red cooking print is by Suzuko Koseki.  You can still find it on Etsy.  I first saw this in her book, Machine Made Patchworks- now  translated as Patchwork Style.  I bought the book a couple of  years ago and it was an epiphany for me of patchworking style and fabrics.  I didn't even know Suzuko Koseki was the author or that she had designed the fabrics, I was just transfixed by the texty kitchen imagery.

I had to include some vintage in my favourite five.  I am not sure where this little dotty scrap came from, but it is a precious little scrap.   It is so vibrant and buzzy, all those little lines make it come to life for me, a tiny piece but well used.

Aprons are a great source of vintage fabric, I picked this one up a while ago from the car boot sale and I have used it on a number of little projects.  Like the other vintage scrap it has a dynamic feel- all the quite circles and squares dancing around and the colour combination is a favourite.

Check out the others at the linky party, it is interesting to see what others pick and why.  I could have kept choosing forever, I feel like I left some out, they wait for another time...

Washing Line

August was Corey's month in Ringo Pie so I am playing catch up.  Her theme was Quilts on a Line, and I struggled for a long time to come up with anything that really gripped me.  When I buy vintage and thrifted fabrics from the carboot, there is nothing I like more than the line of freshly washed fabrics and tea towels flapping in the breeze later the same morning, 

that  is what I wanted to capture.
Pinterest is useful for finding and storing ideas as I get my head around a project and you can see my board for Corey here.   I sketched my idea onto grid paper, traced on to freezer paper and set to work.

Soem of the work was done for me by the fabric- the crazy hexagon cheater print (which you can also see it in the top pic) was perfect.  I imagine this as a throw that might go on a sofa.  A quilt comes next, made of strips of Anna Maria Horner's Little Folks Voiles, perfect for mini items as the fabric is lightweight and doesn't bulk the seams up.  The tricky bit was where the hexagon quilt flaps over, don't even ask about that bit- it was a long night gettting that to work.  The next quilt is a vintage bed quilt, I thought I wuld show how I worked this one out.  I started with 1.5 inch squares framed with half square triangles cut from 2 inch squares.  I made up enough mini blocks to cover the length of the freezer paper template plus a half block.

I then arranged the squares to follow the lines of the template...

I had to allow for the quarter inch seam allowance at the top and I pinned  on o the ironing board as I worked my way down joining the seams at angles with pins.  Once these were sewn together, I placed the mini quilt  on the template and cut the edges with scissors to follow the lines of the finished shape.

I used wide strips of ditzy flowery fabrics for the mini quilt borders- they needed to be wide to be trimmed down to the wavy shape.  By laying the mini quilt on the fabric- both right side facing and rotary cutting following the wavy edge of the mini quilt, it creates an border that will fit on perfectly.  I then trim the whole shape so is the shape of the freezer paper plus seam allowance.

The washing line is some perle cotton attached by couching stitch.

This is the back, just long stitches of the fine thread which can't be seen on the right side.

The final fabric is meant to be a tablecloth with its kitchen themed print.  I added some clothes pegs and a bird for a little extra hand stitching detail, Corey is the queen of embroidered blocks after all.   Click on the pic to see more details.

I do wish I had shaped the Little Folks Quilt more at the bottom but too late now.  I am pleased at the flappiness of the line, they do feel like they are blowing in the breeze.  Next I need to think about Christmas for Amber's block...