Wiser

One day older and a whole year wiser. My 51st year was quite eventful but the 52nd will be smooth sailing. Yeah.

Happy Easter

I have been battling with two needs these last few days – the need to start a couple of new projects and the need to do nothing. The doing nothing won. Big time. On one hand wasting two days is two days wasted, but on the other hand it’s also two days rested (which is a good thing considering I’m spending most of the week with family).

However, I finished one creatively related task today: taking pictures of the last two chicks.

It’s a mother/child duo which makes me smile

They are called “Where did he go?”

and “Don’t worry, he’ll grow into it”.

I tried shooting them outside, and the wind made them move like an animated little moving picture. Can you see mama chasing her baby chick?

You can see the Norwegian motif backing showing through against the sun.

These two belong together.

Anyway; our Easter holidays starts on Thursday and ends on Monday so I’ll be taking the rest of the week off. We’ll be doing lots of this

and enjoying glorious chicks of many shapes and sizes.

Happy Easter everyone; see you next week!

Sew In #13

My Friday Night Sew In became more of a Weekend Mend In, but who cares, I got some long overdue mending done. I do enjoy mending clothes. Period. Kids’ clothes, daughter’s, mine, husband’s, nieces’, it doesn’t matter. Giving our clothes a longer life, being frugal, being creative, whatever - it’s all a labor of love.

On my list this morning was daughter’s favorite sweater, 2 pair of grandson’s pants and a wool pants, and one of my jeans and wool socks. All done now and it feels good.

I have a hard time leaving my sewing room without doing something quilting related, so I added a little embellishment to the last of my chick quilts which I thought was done, but it wasn’t so now it has a couple of experimental free motion stitched flowery creations.

I was totally sure I would use red orange and bright pink yarn to pick up the colours of the beak and feet,

but it did not look right, so I went with the light purple and green. Much better.

I also did a little no-sew-mending in the morning before kindergarten. Grandson’s snow pants had a big tear on the knee and the back, and I did not want to stitch it as it would make holes in the water resistant fabric. Duct tape to the rescue, I was a duct tape virgin so I was surprised to see that it was still intact after a day of play.

The only complaint is that it doesn’t have a band aid effect. The tear will still be there when I remove the tape. Won’t it?

Have a wonderful weekend!

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Make a Text appliqué pattern

I love adding text to my quilts. It can be anything – a word, a name, a quote. On small quilts I’ll use a variety of techniques, like on the technique sampler that I made for my book Gledesspredere which has 24 of them (tekst=text).

On bigger quilts I will usually appliqué my text using fusible web. Sometimes I’ll draw the letters freehand, but usually I use Word to create my pattern. I thought some of you could be interested in how I do that, so I have posted a step by step tutorial.

My version of Word is in Norwegian, but you’ll find the same options in your version. Click here to go to the tutorial.

Thanks for stopping by!

Make a Text appliqué pattern

I love adding text to my quilts. It can be anything – a word, a name, a quote. On small quilts I’ll use a variety of techniques, but on bigger quilts I will usually appliqué my text using fusible. Sometimes I’ll draw the letters freehand, but usually I use Word to create my pattern.

You should be able to enlarge the pictures by clicking on them. My version of Word is in Norwegian so there’s a chance your screen will look a bit different.)

Open a new document and write your text.

For the rest of this tutorial the text has to be highlighted for each step.

Choose a font. Try out a few and see how you like them, you can easily change them as you go along. Some of my favorite appliqué fonts are Kristen ITC and Matisse (all capital letters). Click to see all your options, and choose one.

Choose a size. You’ll find all the “preset” sizes herebut you can also fill in any number yourself.

I have chosen size 300.

You may need to adjust the size to fit your text into wherever it’s going.

If you want your letters to be fatter, click bold.

Now you’re going to remove all that black; it makes the pattern easier to copy and it saves ink. Click that little arrow at the bottom of your text options to open a box. Click on the tab that shows the info about font types and sizes. Check the box next to Contour and OK.

Your letters will look like these.

The last thing you need to do is to mirror image the text. This may be different from printer to printer, but here’s how I do it on mine.Click print. This box will pop up. Click on the marked box

Go through the different tabs until you find Mirror image, and check the box, then click OK.

Now your text will be printed out ready to transfer onto fusible. It might be a good idea to check that your text will fit by cutting the printed words/letters apart and try them on the background. The size can easily be changed by choosing a larger or smaller font.

Layer the fusible on top of your pattern, glue side down, and trace each letter. If you’re using one fabric for the text, you don’t need much space between them.

Fuse them onto the wrong side of your text fabric, and cut each letter out. Remove the paper. Arrange your text onto the background. 

Fuse it in place with a hot iron (check the packing of your brand of fusible) when you're happy. Appliqué or quilt them as you choose.

If my text is long, I will usually delete any multiple letters.

To make sure I get the correct number of each letter, I’ll spell my way through the text and mark the letters on the pattern sheets until I have the full text.

Have fun!

Order, please

From mess

to order just by rearranging the portraits, leaving a 6” “border” around the edges.

Time to free motion quilt them onto the background.

The christening quilt has been in the works since the beginning of February 2012 when I sent out letters to family members asking them to draw their self portraits. Just simple, non-fancy drawings with their names on. Honestly, it was a little like pulling teeth, but after a few months I had received most of them. Oddly enough, the last 3 portraits to fall into place were grandson’s, husband’s and mine. Go figure.

The blue quilted background was finished almost a year ago with the binding hand stitched to the back and all. The only thing missing were the faces and grandbaby’s name and date of birth and my will/inspiration/need/whatever to finish it.

There’s nothing as inspiring as a real life deadline, is there…

Tea Towel Take 6 (?): Border 2 in progress

The deadline for finishing the Tea towel challenge is at the end of this month, and although I won’t be able to do the quilting by then with Easter coming up and all, I still want to have the top finished. The quilt is to be a medallion quilt with as many or few borders as we like. My plan is two borders (first one here), but this second border will hopefully be a two-for-one border, so maybe 2 and a half...

To have lots of options both size- and colour wise, I made approx 60 jagged border units. None of them are alike, but they will be cut into 3 different lengths as the borders will be 6”, 7” and 8” (finished width).

I did not audition the units on the design wall (flannel backed vinyl table cloth) first, which was a mistake. Although the first right side border looked fine at first,

I noticed how much defined the pattern was on the left border, and how washed out some of the units on the right looked in comparison.

Not wanting to make the same mistake again, I auditioned my replacement units before I did the actual rip/restitch work.

Aaah, so much better!

Top border; I’ll replace the corners, but I’m very happy with how the jagged pattern comes to life.

And bottom border without corners.

I’ll switch the top and bottom borders as it seems a bit off balance, and I’ll have to work out how to do the corners. I have an idea though; I'll keep you posted on how that works out, but for now I'm just enjoying the process very much indeed.

Thanks for stopping by!

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.