A sneaky Teal

A while ago, I volunteered to test a pattern for Teresa of Sewn Up – TeresaDownUnder.

It was a new design called Win My Heart, a lovely pieced designs with hearts and triangles. I made one change to the pattern, which was adding that strip of floral down the centre to make the quilt just a little wider. I’ve been working on it in the background to everything over the past few months, and I’ve finally finished quilting it. I’m going to donate it to Ovarian Cancer Australia because, of course, I managed to get teal into the name and the fabrics I chose. As well as the teal hearts on the front and the gorgeous teal, pink, peach and yellow floral pattern, it has a pale pink backing and a binding in mostly brighter pink. Despite all that, it’s not too terribly girly.

This is Gonna Teal Your Heart Away.  I made some errors in my fabric choices and when I was assembling and quilting it, so it’s not by any means perfect (or even completely straight!), and doesn’t really do justice to the beauty and clarity of the pattern, but Ovarian Cancer Australia say they’ll be delighted to have it anyway, either as a gift to someone in need, or as a comforting snuggle quilt for someone hearing bad news in their counselling centre.

As always, the label on the back gives credit where it’s due: in this case, to Teresa as the designer as well as me as the stitcher. It also pays tribute to all those women past and present who have suffered from Ovarian Cancer, and by their suffering have contributed to improvements in knowledge and treatment of this silent killer.

Do go and take a look at Teresa’s pattern, which shows not only her quilt but examples of those made by her pattern testers. It’s a beautiful and versatile pattern, and I’m glad and privileged to have been part of the process, especially as it’s made such a pretty quilt for OCA.

That’s it teal-wise for a while. My airmail fabric for ST&D has arrived, but I have an appointment to quilt Sea Glass for my SIL before I touch any of that 🙂

 

Signed, Tealed & Delivered #2: fabric update

Please call off the search!

I’ve located the perfect airmail stripe at Hawthorne Threads in the US, for a reasonable price and even more reasonable postage.

Grateful thanks to everyone who offered to look and send me something, I really appreciate it, especially those of you who’d have to send it a long way 🙂

There has been a brilliant response to the call to action for this quilt. We now have just the following blocks left for which we don’t yet have a maker committed:

• 9 paper pieced envelope blocks
• 4 appliqué postcard blocks

If necessary, I can make these up myself, but if anyone out there is debating whether they have time to help or not, you have a while to think about it, as I don’t plan to start assembling till September.

Now for some other news. Katy Cameron of The Littlest Thistle had created a lovely paper pieced envelope block for an Easter post on her blog in April. It was too small to use here, but she has very kindly resized it for us to use for ST&D. If you are making one of the paper pieced envelope blocks and would like to use it, please let me know, together with an email address if I don’t already have one for you, and I’ll send you the pdfs.  A link to the relevant blog post can be found here, so you can see what the block looks like. I’m so grateful to Katy for saving me the trouble of drawing one up myself!

And finally, I’ve just heard from Ovarian Cancer Australia that TWX has arrived safely and they’re absolutely delighted with it.

Well done, you lot!

You’ve got mail…

Er, what? 

Bear with me…

Here’s the deal. For a few days now, I’ve been mulling over an idea for the next Ovarian Cancer donation quilt. As some of you know (and most of you deplore!), I have a terrible habit of using puns not only in my posts, but sometimes in the names of my quilts. For Ovarian Cancer Australia donation quilts, these puns incorporate the word Teal, as that is the Ovarian Cancer colour. We’ve had ‘Time for Teal’, and ‘Tealed with a Kiss’. Now, it’s time for ‘Signed, Tealed & Delivered’. You see where I’m going with this, don’t you? The quilt is going to have a postal theme: postcards, envelopes, stamps, etc. Here’s where my thinking has arrived so far:

© 2017 TallTalesFromChiconia

As always, the colour scheme is predominantly shades of teal and cream. To give this one a bit more liveliness, though, I’m thinking we should add a bit more subsidiary colour, so long as there’s still plenty of teal and cream.

As before, I’m hoping for a collaborative quilt, and that some of you will be interested in participating. The idea I’m looking at calls for a number of different types of blocks: straightforward piecing of HSTs (half-square triangles), paper piecing (I’ll provide a pattern or you can make up your own), or appliqué/embroidery/piecing. This time, I’m asking for blocks to be 13 inches square instead of 12½; on the last two quilts, the quilting shrank the blocks to the point where it was sometimes a bit of a squeeze to trim out to the right size. For the four pieced corner blocks, you can stick to the 12½ inches square and I’ll just quilt them more lightly – I don’t want to make your arithmetic more complex than it has to be…

For this design, I’ll need 4 x HST envelope blocks for the corners, 13 x paper pieced envelope blocks, 10 x appliqué postcard blocks, an appliqué stamp block, an embroidered frank block and the usual ribbon appliqué block, which I’ll make myself unless someone out there is dying to give it a go. If I don’t get enough interest, I’ll modify this design to simplify things and slowly make the blocks I need myself.

If you’re interested in participating, either again or for the first time, please drop me an email using the details to be found on my Contact Me page, or say so in a comment below. And if you’re a new visitor, take a look at these previous Ovarian Cancer quilts for an idea of what we can achieve if we all work together 🙂

Time for Teal,  Stay Positive,  Tealed with a Kiss.

Do also go and have a look at my Ovarian Cancer Pinterest page, where I’ve saved some pins for inspiration for this and other ideas.

And finally, a plea for help: if anyone knows where I can buy a metre of red, white and blue diagonal stripe 100% cotton quilting fabric without paying a truly ridiculous amount of postage (US$50 postage for one yard!!), please let me know. I want it to bind the quilt, to give the effect of the stripes around the edge of an airmail envelope.

I hope some of you will join me on this next adventure!

 

 

TWX 15: Tealed with a Kiss completed

It’s done, and on its way.

I decided to make the binding narrow, because I love how it looks, but it does add a whole level of extra difficulty to hand-stitching the binding down because there’s a lot less slack. I probably won’t make the binding so narrow another time. Somewhere between ‘normal’ and this skinny, which was 2 inch wide binding strips instead of 2½ inch.

Of course, the minute I wanted to photograph it outside, the rain came down, so it’s been photographed inside on the design wall. Sorry… it does make everything a bit duller.

Here’s the label, and all you lovely kind people who contributed a block (or several!)  will find your names there if you click on the image and enlarge it. Thank you all again for your wonderful, beautiful blocks and for contributing your time and fabric to this most important cause. I couldn’t have done it without you, and I hope you will continue to join in with our collaborative quilts in the future.

I’ve been mulling over the next OCA quilt off the production line. This won’t be starting for about 6 months, but I wanted to put the idea out there so anyone who wants to contribute has some time to think about what they want to do. It’s going to be called ‘Signed, Tealed and Delivered’, and it’s going to have a postal theme. My idea is that the blocks will still finish at 12½ inches square, but they will feature the front and back of a fabric postcard on a teal background. I’m visualising appliqué, but it could be pieced. The front can depict anything you like (patterned fabric, paper pieced image, machine embroidery, whatever takes your fancy), and the back should be cream fabric, laid out to look like a postcard, with a stamp, a fictitious address, a message and your signature, either embroidered, printed, or using an indelible marker. I’m thinking all the stamps should be teal, and the postcard fronts should feature teal in some way. Closer to the time we start this quilt, I’ll produce an example to show what I’m thinking.

What do you think? Do you have a better idea for executing this title? As always, I welcome suggestions and input, but will ultimately go with whatever I think works best 🙂

TWX 14: assembly complete

And it’s done.

Why does the wind always start blowing when I want to take a photo of a quilt on the line…? We’ll pretend it’s on purpose, shall we? To make the image more dynamic and give it some movement!

Now all I have to do is cut and sew the binding, and make and attach the label. Another day will see it finished, thank goodness, and I can stop worrying about it, and start working on other things.

The quilt has extracted its customary tribute of blood; I managed to accidentally rip a nice hole in my thumb on a stray pin as I was feeding the quilt through the machine, but I did avoid getting any of it on the quilt in a visible place. It doesn’t mean my DNA isn’t on it, just that you can’t see it!

So, tomorrow I cut and sew on the binding and stitch it down, and make the label, which as usual will be printed on transfer paper and then ironed onto fabric. It will acknowledge all the lovely, kind and generous people who have contributed their time, energy and fabric to this good cause.

Now, where are the Band Aids…?

TWX13: Top third done

What we have here is the final layout.

All the blocks have been trimmed out and are in their final positions. I’ve joined the blocks in the top third of the quilt. Two more thirds to do, then two long, long seams and it’s done. This QAYG process absolutely gets easier the more you do it, especially if you have all your strips ready, cut to size and pressed. Touching wood carefully, I’ve managed to avoid drawing blood even once, and have come up with a couple of minor tricks which helped me keep things neatly lined up.

I’ve decided to bind it with something a bit lighter and bluer than previous choices. I like this greeny-bluey flat colour with the general colour scheme of the quilt, rather than the dark teal shot cotton I’ve used for the last two.

This quilt has to be ready by the end of the third week in April. Ovarian Cancer Australia have a big fundraising month in May, so it needs to be with them by end of April/beginning of May.

Looks like I’m going to make it 🙂

TWX12: nearly there…

One more attempt at the layout, and this time, I’m pretty happy.

I think we’re just about there…

There’s a bit more symmetry, which always makes me happy, it feels more balanced, and I’m not trying to force the blocks to be a colour or intensity they’re not. Everyone’s work is beautiful, and stands on its own merit. Well done, you lot 🙂

I’m just over halfway through the quilting. Three rows done, another row part done, two still to start. That old faithful of mine, wiggly line quilting, is featuring once again. You’ve got to love how very quick it is. Nothing to mark, no panicky FMQ-type changes of direction, just strap on the walking foot and swing yourself some gentle curves down the centre. And echo. And echo again, till you hit the edge. Reverse the piece and repeat to the other edge. Job done. No threads to bury, all the loose ends get trimmed off. Having said that, I have a hankering to do a bit of FMQ stuff at some stage, but not for a donation quilt. Only the Teal Ribbon block will be different; I’ll echo quilt the ribbon shape to make it pop a bit.

Thank you to everyone who contributed their thoughts on how best to improve the layout. I took it all on board and tried everything… and then did it my way 😉