Saturday 16 March 2013

Quilt Day

Happy Quilt Day everyone! My name is Nina Lise and I am a Norwegian quilter who most of all love the creative side of quilting and to share my favourite pastime here on my blog Mrs Moen, through my book Gledesspredere, as a designer for the Scandinavian quilting magazine Quiltemagasinet, and through teaching a variety of quilting classes. You’ll find tabs to my pattern and tutorial pages on the top of the page.

Although I did not get to spend the whole International Quilt Day quilting, I made progress on two projects – the christening quilt and the tea towel quilt.

This fabulous stack of blocks

will soon become my first ever jagged border for the tea towel quilt. I have been planning the border for a couple of weeks, and the plans have changed more than once. As soon as I thought I had a brilliant idea, I changed my mind. In the end I had to just go for it, and after spending a whole guild meeting ironing scraps and cutting strips, I had a stack of rectangles in different lengths but with the same width, 4 ¼”. The light fabric is the duvet cover which I used for the text, and the dark pieces are the same fabrics that I used for making the scrappy blocks.

There was some slashing and bias piecing involved, and now they are ready to get pieced into borders. I think they will look fun; we’ll see, the colours are certainly fun.

Then I started working on the portraits for the christening quilt, fusing yesterday’s faces to red felt and managing to melt the (synthetic) felt with my iron. I was listening to a podcast which had me laughing and I wasn’t paying attention (that darn multitasking thing again).

I spent quite a while trying to get it off - until I realized I could scratch it off with my fingers. While I was at it, I also tried to remove some of the burned gooey that has been there for ages but with little result other than feeling somewhat queasy from the smell of rubbing alcohol. Any tips on how to do that? Without the alcohol?

Anyways, queasy or not, I stitched around the portraits,

cut them out and spent some time arranging them on the quilted background. It’s not looking right, again. The portraits are small and it's way too busy. I’ll rearrange them in a more orderly way tomorrow, but the faces will still be small. There's no way I'll make them a third time, but maybe I can replace some of them with the first batch of big heads, they've got to be somewhere around here.
 
So that was the quilting part of my Quilt Day, how was yours?

I’m linking up with SewCalGal’s International Quilting Day Virtual Sew-cial.

8 comments:

  1. The easiest way to get that off your iron is let it heat up then turn it off and use a dryer sheet like bounce or snuggle or whatever you have where you live and it comes off great. I just had to clean mine from a melted bag a couple of weeks ago.
    Happy quilting day.

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    1. sorry forgot to say just scrub the bottom of your iron with the dryer sheet, no water or anything. Just be careful not to burn your fingers since the iron is still hot. :-)

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  2. Happy International Quilting day to you too! You've been busy! Lots of fun projects to make your sewing day happy.
    For yucky stuff on my iron I use a product called "Iron Off - Hot Iron Cleaner" by Dritz. Not sure if you have it in Norway?

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  3. Oh I like the bold graphic of your faces against the scrummy blue background! Quite dramatic. It seems like you can whip up a quilt in no time....amazing. xox

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  4. I'm so happy you could join our virtual sew-cial to celebrate International Quilting Day. Love all your projects. Sorry about your iron. I agree with all the other recommendations. Dryer sheets are inexpensive and frequently a good way to get gunk off an iron. Dritz, Rowenta and Bo-Nash all make good products to clean irons too. And, I recently learned of a new household cleaning product called Magic Eraser that also works well on a cold iron (and great for cleaning hard to clean things around the house too).

    SewCalGal
    www.sewcalgal.blogspot.com

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  5. Girl, you have been busy! Love the idea of the portraits on the little guy's quilt. What a lovely keepsake.
    Hugs

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  6. I use Mr. Clean magic Eraser to clean my iron.

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  7. You also can iron a paper bag with table salt on it....a grocer bag works great and you dont have to buy anything.

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