Kathy's Dear Jane

I thought it would be fun to join this festival. This is the Dear Jane that I hand pieced and hand quilted.

I used the English paper method for almost all of the blocks. I went back and appliquéd five of the small circles that I was unhappy with.

This quilt was a true adventure. It took about two years to achieve.

 Here are some photos.

The back of the quilt looks like this.This was when I was adding the three layers together.

Have an amazing blog hop. Here is the festival address:
Quilt festival

Dear Jane completed

Dear Jane is complete.

Here are the dates

started 1st of June 2012 and finished on the 18th April 2014.  This was a span of 686 days.

Piecing started 1st June 2012 finished 24th April 2013 which is 327 days.

Started stitching the blocks together on the 26th April 2013 and finished on the 18th of August 2013. It took 114 days to put this quilt together.

Took another 34 days break in which I made the backing.

Started quilting on the 21st of September 2013 and complete on the 18th of April 2014. The quilting took 205 days.

Took 646 days sewing to make my Dear Jane quilt. 

Here is the label. This is the first quilt that I have labelled.

What a journey.

Have an amazing day!

Happy Easter 2014

Happy Easter everyone. I hope you have an amazingly quilty long weekend.

I am busy doing the binding at a blinding speed and can see the end in sight. 

I have been fiddling about with Label ideas and soon will be hauling out my thread and needle and stitching one.

I was sitting stitching the binding which is so very boring when I thought it would be fun to share all of the things that I use for quilting.

Firstly who could do quilting without a computer. I love doing my pattern, progress and maths on spreadsheet. The internet is also needed for getting inspiration and just viewing other people's blogs. I am sure that there are many people who would be surprised as to what an inspiration they were to me.

The next is my work box. This is the box that organically gets filled with what I am using for the current phase of my project. Most of the stuff shown below was taken out of this little box. I know when a project is finished, when I unpack the project box and put away all the items contained in it.

Glasses who can do without them. It is one of those annoying things of when you have the calmness of spirit to do quilting, you are probably old enough to need glasses to see small details.

The next thing is duct tape. No it is not for keeping the family quiet so that you can stitch longer, but rather for making stencils out of paper and then backing these stencils with tape to make them stronger.

While we are on stencils I must say that I find a husband really nice as they are way more pedantic so my stencils are normally amazing. These are the stencils that I have been using for the border on the Dear Jane.

I made my own bias binding for this project and these little things were really helpful in the creation of all of the metres of binding that were made.

I suppose I should have included a picture of spray starch as that was equally a hero in the production of the tape.

I love the little roses on the fabric.

This is something new in my collection. Oh how I like using these amazing clips. They seem to make the whole binding exercise a piece of cake. They have sped up the whole binding process. If you are ever going to hand stitch binding, then these clips are worth it.

I love their red plastic goodness!

Needles. I seem to go through in inordinate number of needles when I am quilting. Maybe it is due to being too heavy handed when rocking the fabric. I need to change needles as soon as the curve. I currently have a whole bottle of bent needles.

To mark the fabric I have gone through almost every pen, clutch pencil and system that has been put on the market. These are ones that really work. The general pencils were suggested by someone on facebook. I ordered some online and have been excessively happy with using them. I added some extra pictures to show which pencils they were.

I know you can all recognise the quick unpicks. The crochet hooks I use to snag any threads that I can see under the fabric. Doing all of the piecing by hand, there are often bits of thread left behind. Unfortunately there are pieces of paper left behind as well, this is where there unpickers come in handy.

I always try to check that there are no pieces of paper left behind, but...

The next thing I found in my work box were Plasters. This proves that quilting is an extreme activity.

I use a plaster under my thimble to stop it from hurting. I also have a whole collection of thimbles, The rubberised ones go on my left hand. This is normally under the ring and guides the needle back up. This no doubt proves that my style needs some adjustments.

I am still learning. I hope that I will get better at this activity.

I have three pairs of scissors in my work box. They each get used. I like the black scissors. They cut fabric like a dream, but, are inexpensive. In fact they are affordable enough that I cut both paper and fabric with them and then get a new pair when the scissors become dull.

And lastly. My thread. Oh YLI, how I do love using you. I used a whole lot of other quilting threads until I can upon YLI. Well I will always use it even though I do sometimes find it difficult to source it. The effort is worth it. I find that it does not tangle or split as much as the other threads that I have used.

Well that is all from my sewing box. I must get back to sewing on the binding.

Enjoy the First full moon after the spring/autumn equinox and I hope the Easter bunny bring you a whole lot of chocolate.

Have a good one.

Dear Jane - quilting completed

 I have just stitched the last stitch of quilting on my Dear Jane. It has taken me 203 days to do the quilting. I had a goal of doing 1 block a day. In my estimation there are 281 blocks that need quilting. This is including the triangles. I sped up with my time off work in December and yay I finished 78 days early.

I like the graph it shows the speed up. I also think it is easier to quilt the closer to the edge you get.

I have used up 1.5 spools of YLI and whole lot of boxes of plasters. I put a plaster on my centre right finger so that the metal thimble does not hurt. I also put a rubberised plaster my pointy finger to improve grip. I like the fact that plasters have become part of craft supplies.

I have been working out numbers for doing the binding. I think with the curves on each block at the most it will be about 4 metres a side. So that is 16 metres of sewing on the bias. 16 metres of tacking the quilt in place and then 16 metres of sewing the bias binding on the back. This makes 48 metres of stitching.

 If I aim for 2 metres a day then the quilt should be finished on the 6th of May. With Easter and all the other holidays that we have in this country this month, I will hopefully finish it before then. It is times like this that I really do question not using my sewing machines to just whip on the binding.
I like being doing it all by hand so I must take the fun of stitching on the binding, just the same as I have with the piecing of the quilt by hand.

The spider is inspecting the work. Please note his hairy legs.

Have an amazing day!

Dear Jane - quilting has started

So after such a long wait the poor Dear Jane Quilt has a back.

The batting was sandwiched in yesterday and today I have actually started quilting on it. 

Today I found my quilting thread and all of the tiny needles that I would need. I even bought some extra hand cream as quilting is quite harsh on the hands. I should have just gone and got my normal vitamin E cream that I use as the one that I got has perfume in it and it burned my poor delicate skin.

 It is such a thrill to put the quilt into the wooden circle for the first time. This thrill soon wares off as the reality of quilting 277 separate units. It was even fun seeing the pins that were keeping the layers together. This thrill dissipated as each pin managed to draw blood as I was taking them out of the quilt. My thumb nail too was complaining as the pins are really tight. The last one I opened using a quick unpick but that I think damaged the pin. The quick unpick I was not that worried about as I have sooo many of them.

 I always quilt from the centre out and I enjoyed starting with a happy circle. My stitching is really gross to start with and then improved to merely shoddy. As an excuse is the fact that I have only been doing quilting for 3 years and ... ok so I just need more practice, no excuses give.

The thing is that the quilts feel great and tactile and that is all that you need form a quilt. What I also liked about the centre block is that the first square is going to be right in the middle of a backing square and from here on in the will slowly but surely slide of the centre and meander into no-mans land of imprecise placement. See quilting is really and exercise in Zen.

You really have to just accept what the way the quilt will come out and not destroy the calm of trying to only accept perfection.

The next three I will do are all the greens and then I will box off the middle and start on the next occurrence.  I can see the program and now that I am initiated I just have to keep on stitching and before I know it I will be at 2% complete as it is I have not even reached 1%.

See the Dear Jane quilt is also good for maths skills as I sit and stitch I also calculate what percent I have completed and how far the thread that I have stitched would actually go.

Have a stunning day.

Top together

The borders and corners have now been added to the centre of the Dear Jane. Here are various pictures.