Who’s The Prettiest of Them All?

I bought this panel of the Frozen princesses To make a quilt ( or wall hanging) for my grand-niece who is a great fan of the two!

The Frozen Princesses Anna and Elsa are my grand-niece K’s favourites!

She was due to visit us and I thought of a quick gift for her. But how boring would this be!

So I came up with this idea.

K goes to the centre of the panel, while the other two look at her admiringly.

I printed her face on a printer-ready fabric sheet after calculating the size I would need to make it.

Everything got more complicated than necessary because I planned to put K on the right side. I cut out the pink princess ( is that Elsa or Anna?) before I realised that that would make my darling Princess K an ‘outsider’ because the other two had interlocked arms.

So I disengaged their arms and locked them with Princess K’s who moved to the centre. Ah, that’s the way I like it. The Disney Princesses look at her admiringly ( and a bit enviously?). The Resident Consultant did not think much of my original idea of a silver dress for his Princess. So I retained the silver yoke and made her blue dress from…a rayon grocery bag! ( Jaipur is a big exporter of women’s clothing. With single use plastic being banned in India, our shopkeepers are using bags made from export-surplus fabric and export-reject dresses).

The quilting was kept to a minimum. ( Also because I had just over a couple of hours for the quilting and finishing). I folded the lighter pink border to the back of the quilted piece, leaving the darker plum inner border to frame the quilt. No binding. The top border became the sleeve.

Not that my Princess minded the short-cuts taken to finish her portrait! She couldn’t believe what she saw.

“How? wow! how? wow…”, she exclaimed!

And here is the Princess herself, posing with her quilted wall-hanging.

Princess K loves her quilt!

Now that done, I have to decide what comes up next!

A Small Delay in Block Two…

Happy Independence Day to all Indians across the globe!
Not very good news at my end this morning. My laptop is bothering me no end! It has a screen all stretched out – just looking at which is driving me crazy. And the wi-fi is not working.
To get back to the beginning, it crashed a week ago back and had a lot of “bad sectors”. I got it back from the service centre with a new hard drive this morning. Thankfully, they have managed to save all the data, which includes all the detailed designs and templates for the Round the Year Quilt. (All except the photos, which they are still extracting from the old drive! I have my fingers crossed – that drive has all my pictures from the last ten years!)
But it seems they put in the wrong ‘driver’ and the screen resolution is all wrong. And they can’t find the appropriate ‘driver’ for the broadband! They have connected it to the net through a cable, but that is painfully slow. I can take a short nap in the time it takes to move from one page to the next!
To cut a long story short, you are not going to get the pattern for the second block of the Round the Year quilt until I can get it in some kind of working order!
This is being posted from my iPad, by the way!

While you wait and I can master my ill temper and get working on that laptop again, here are two more gorgeous Dahlias and a divine lotus that some very talented ladies have made! Enjoy!

The sacred White Lotus by Tina Katwal

Diptee Raut’s Dahlia in soft aquas

The Indigo Dahlia(or `Nilopatal’ as she like to call it) by Sobana Sundar

Dusk Dreamcatcher Round the Year Quilt : Fabric Requirement – Downloadable file

Dusk Round the Year

I had this horrible nightmare last night, where I had given the wrong fabric requirements for the “Round the Year” Block of the Month I am hosting! In the morning, I checked, but all seems to be okay, except the requirement for 36″  background fabric which I increased to 3.5 metres from the more conservative 3.25 metres.

I also saw a request on my blog for a downloadable file for the fabric requirement, which I think is a great idea.  As there are at least two `official’  colourways, to avoid confusion, I am calling the blue- orange -yellow version “Dusk Round the Year” !

I am so fascinated by the wonderful colours  that the setting sun paints across the skies – the brilliant oranges, golds and yellows – colours that can be rarely matched on canvas.   Some may claim that sunrises are equally beautiful, but being a late riser I am rarely up in time to appreciate those.   My quilt is, I hope, going to be evocative of  languid monsoon evenings – grey clouds looming while the blues, more brilliant than ever after the rains, struggle to make their presence felt  before the indigo darkness prevails!

Evening at the Pond

I do so ramble on, don’t I? So without much further ado, here is the Fabric Requirement -Round the Year – Dusk !

You will need Adobe Reader (available free online) on your laptop to be able to view this file.

For those of you planning to make the `Rainbow’ version of the quilt, I hope to be able to post the requirements by tomorrow.

Please note that the patterns and instruction files for the quilt blocks are being migrated to my store MadsPatch.company.site and will not be available for download here from 15th November 2020 onwards.

What You Can Do With A Single Quilt Block…

…and why you are going to enjoy this Block of the Month!

I am one of those people who jump headlong into a project and the enthusiasm peters out in no time. I often don’t start a great looking new quilt, because I don’t know if I’ll finish it. Who doesn’t hate the thought of adding to those sad orphan blocks calling out to them to do something, anything with them!? Besides, what a waste of money and effort, which most of us cannot readily spare. I don’t want that to happen to any of you lovely people out there who embark on “Round the Year”, my Block of the Month Quilt! So I decided to pattern all my blocks to be versatile, stand alone blocks. At any stage, you can say, “Okay, that’s enough, I am not going to make any more of these!” (Though I do hope you won’t!). There are lots of ways you can use them, just as many as you end up with. I was playing around with my laptop and here are the options I came up with. (One of the advantages is that we have fairly big blocks which finish at 18″ with a 15″ inset circle.)

So what if you decide to make only one block?

Quilt it and make into a small table topper 18″ square. Incidentally, this is a test block made by my online quilter friend Nikhat Syeda– hasn’t she done a marvellous job? Reduce the size of the square to 15″, which is a great size for cushion cover. You could make a set of cushion covers depending on how many blocks you end up with. Add a border, quilt it to make a stunner of a wall hanging! Another quilter friend Sobana tested the same block. (She has even blogged about it here – you must see the other wonderful work she has done!). She is going to use it as the centre of a quilt she is planning! I am waiting to see what she comes up with – but this does give you an idea of what you can do with a single block! I almost forgot to remind you of what I did with a single block – in fact , with a little less than a single block… I skipped the outer square and quilted the pieced circle into a pretty, round table top.   This is my friend Aliya Mir’s test block , which I have photoshopped to show you the look. Well, tomorrow evening I give the fabric requirements for the full quilt, do tune in! But before that, tomorrow morning I am experimenting with various quilt layouts here on this blog!

BOOKMARKED! Free Pattern!

Rose Stem -Bookmark

I quilted this bookmark as a gift for an unknown recipient in Japan! I used scraps (some as small as ¾” square!) of my precious Fossil Fern Fabric (by Bernatex) to piece the rose stem. It was totally improvised on a piece of fusible fabric stabilizer 2.5″ X 9″. When I discovered it could not be done in a single piece, I made a diagonal cut below the upper leaf, and pieced the lower leaf separately. The bud was an afterthought!

I have made a paper piecing template for the bookmark which can be downloaded here Bookmark -Rose Stem Paper piecing Templates. Remember to print the templates in the landscape mode of your printer! The instructions can also be downloaded separately as a .pdf file, as I have not been able to work out how to put the instructions and templates in a single file Bookmark -Rose Stem -Instructions L It is presumed that you know how to do foundation paper piecing! There are several great tutorials available online too!

( I used QuiltAssistant free software by www.timcosman.nl for making the pattern! I absolutely love it!)

Foundation Paper Piecing Template – Rose – Bookmark (2.5″x 8″)

 INSTRUCTIONS

Fabric Requirement

• Scraps of light coloured fabric for background (Coded 1)
• Green for leaves – I used three shades of green (Coded 6, 4 and 3 – dark to light)
• Scraps in any colour of your choice for the flower and bud – I used 5 shades (Coded 9,2,7,8,5 – dark to light).
  
• 2″ wide strip fabric for binding – 25″ long
  
• 3″ X 9″ piece of fabric for back
  
• 3″ X 9″ piece of heavy batting. You could use a double layer instead, if you do not have heavy batting.
  

Piecing and Binding

• Print Paper piecing templates file. Remember to print this in landscape mode! There are 4 templates, A,B, C and D.
  
• Reduce machine stitch length to 1 or 1.5 before you start piecing. You can trim the seam to about 1/6″, as the pieces are so small. Finger press to flatten after joining each piece. Do not trim the fabric that extend beyond the edges at this stage.
• Using master template given below as guide, join the pieced templates.
  
• Layer with batting and backing and quilt closely on background to highlight the flower and leaves. It would look even nicer hand quilted, I think!
• Trim to 8″ X 2.5″
  
• Binding
  
  • Double the binding strip length wise.
    
  • Cut 2 lengths X 9″ and 2 lengths 3″
    
  • Attach first to the longer sides and hem/ sew to the back. Trim binding at the ends.
    
  • Fold shorter edge of binding inside before you attach it to the width of the bookmark for a neat finish.
    

*Suggestion – Trace templates on to fusible stabilizer and use that for foundation piecing, as it may be difficult to remove paper from such tiny pieces.*

Rose Stem Bookmark Master Template

So go ahead, make your own bookmark!

Quilted bookmark – Rose Stem

…and do link back to share your bookmarks if you decide to make them!

Bookmark -Rose Stem Paper piecing Templates – Please print in landscape mode

Bookmark -Rose Stem -Instructions 

Update : November 2016. 

I recently had the ocassion to make this bookmark and have revised the master template and added some details to the instructions. I used the freezer paper method to piece the templates and could avoid having to take off tiny bits of paper after piecing! As you can see, I also did a button hole stitch on the edges instead of binding them.