New Blog

Hi!

My blog has moved too:

http://pinkandbarbara.wordpress.com/



I hope you will come and visit me there!

Barbara

The scrappy stripquilt tutorial

Hi,

Here is are some instructions on how to make this super-easy strip quilt. I make this type of quilt often when I have leftover strips.

I make one for my friend Karin: and the baby quilt

You can make this quilt out left-over scraps or just normal scraps, but this is how you can do it if you have the more left-over type of scraps,

step 1
Determine what size your scraps are and make the strips as big as your smallest scrap allows you to cut. I mostly cut mine 2,5 inch. As you can see on Karin's quilt I didn't have enough, so I put smaller pieces together and then trimmed them to become the 2,5 inch width I needed.

Step 2
Leave the smaller strips just the way they are and the really big ones you can cut into 2 pieces. Don't care about the size! This will make it even easier to put together!

Step 3
Sort all the scrap strips into 2 pills, dark and light.

Step 4
start sewing light to dark until you get one enormous long strip. (the short sides together ;-))

Step 5
Measure this strip and start calculating. You need to divide the length of the enormous strip width the length you want the quilt to have. You then know how many strips you will get out of the total length. Then multiply with the width of the strips and you know the size of you quilt. Here is an example to explain it:


for instants: For Karins quilt I had a strip that was 44 yards long.

If wanted to make the quilt 86 inches long I would have gotten 18 strips. 18 strips that are 2,5 inch wide sewn together would have been 45 inch which is not wide enough for a quilt. So I had to make my quilt shorter to get it to be wider. So at the end it became a plaid that was 62 inch long and 60 inches wide.
So you have to keep calculating so you get a size that is right for you.

-for people who want it in cm:
I had a long strip that was about 40 meters long. If I wanted the quilt to be 2.20m long it would have only gotten 1.10 m wide, which was to small. But when I made it 160 long it became 150 wide, plaid size.

Step 6
When you know the size of your strips you measure and cut to get your number of strips.

Step 7
Just sew all the strips together. There are no seams here that have to go together, you just sew.

Step 8
You can quilt it with a nice embroidery stitch on your machine if you have that.
like this:

Step 9
Make your quilt square by trimming the top and bottom and but the binding on!

Done!

Gifts, ripplebag and cookie factory

Hi!

I know, I know it has been a long time again since I last posted something. I have been working hard on some things, and I thought I would finish them quite soon, but every time something happend and I thought tomorrow I will blog about it when it is finished and something happend again...anyway..this weeks produce...

My best friend Sasha is having her first baby soon, and of course something had to made for the little one. So I made this nursingbag. It is a bag with pockets on the sides and a little mattress area in between for the baby to lay on when he or she gets changed, complete with bear pillow. This bag is out of the book Patchwork Bears from Dorthe Jollman a Danish patchworker. Cathi and I have made a bearquilt from the same book.

The bag closed:


The bag open, with the small pockets for diapers and clothes. It will get a small sheet or towel on the inside where the baby lays. So you can wash just that sheet and don't have to wash the whole bag every time you change the baby and have an accident.


I had some leftover fabrics, so I made this quilt. It is made out of the same stripmethod I have made other quilts before. It is very simple, but if anybody wants me to write how I do it let me know!






So this has become a lovely travel set with the bag and the quilt. And what is quite funny and really not planned since I just used every inch of my babyscraps is that, if you fold the babyquilt in 4 parts it is exactly the same size as the bag, so you can just put it in there...I was so surprised..


Well these 2 projects were thought to go together fast and not give me much trouble but I have had everything from: having my sewing machine hop over stitches and not seeing until I was almost done (thread was to thick for the needle) to running out of thread, needles breaking and having to go to the store and buy new ones......not being able to find my batting, going to the store to buy a new one and finding the old one as soon as I got home....I think I have had almost every problem I can think of on this quilt..But it is finished and it looks so cute!

I showed you the ripple blanket I am working on and going to be doing as a project together with my friend Karin. She is coming later tonight by plane. She is probably going to make something small to give to a friend of hers who is having a baby soon too, and since I liked her to have a more permanent memory of our project together I made this ripplebag (pattern made by DH) I will post the pattern soon here on the blog.





While I am writing this I am making some chocolate chip cookies. One batch makes so many cookies that it feels like I am in a cookie factory:


Happy Easter!

Barbara

A new addiction

I saw the ripple project on the
possie-gets-cozy blog and really liked it. I hadn't crochet since I was 13, but it is all coming back to me now! This is what it looked like after my first day yesterday and I am totally addicted.



I bought new yarns for this project and chose Silk Alpaca. It was a bit more expensive then I had planned to spend, but I fell in love with the colors and softness of the yarn.

I showed the ripple to a very good friend of mine in Holland, so she is going to start one there, and I am going to start one in Sweden, so that makes the project even more special...

Today I need to really work on this nursingbag I told you about a couple of days ago. My friend Karin is coming in a couple of weeks and she told me she can take the bag and small quilt with her back to Holland. I never really feel comfortable with sending my projects by mail...plus it is expensive...

Bye!

Spring chaos...anyone??

Hi everybody!

First I would like to thank everybody for the comments on the ocean waves quilt!

But...does anybody, like me, has these spring mood swings where you just want to to change everything in your house, colors, furniture, but mostly just turning all the furniture around.

I have had this feelings all week and I have started the turning of all the furniture... and,yes my husband is very happy with all this since he has to do the moving *lol* I just mostly stand there and point where it has to go.

Anyway, we are going to go to IKEA Wednesday and get a new desk and some other things, so I am looking forward to that. My husband has this old desk, which is gigantic, very good because there is lots of room in the all the drawers but it might be a bit to big in this apartment...

Well, I have started changing and cleaning things in the bedroom and in the sewing room, so today will be spent putting everything back into place, because it is chaos now. I am hoping that we will be able to fit our old bed into my sewing room because we are getting a lot of guests the next 4 months.

At the moment I am sewing a nursing bag for my best friend who will have a baby soon, and I think I will have enough scraps to make a small baby quilt of it as well. I also found a pattern of an apron that I really like and would love to make.

well I'll keep you posted on the moving of all the furniture, and am hoping it will be soon be over, so I can sew again...

bye!

Finished my Ocean waves top!

hi!

I just finished my Ocean Waves quiltop. It was a lot of work but so worth it! I couldn't wait to put a picture online and share it with you... I didn't think it would become this large, but it did: 70x 80 inches

I made it using Triangles on a Roll, which worked great for me. I used my stash and scraps to get a nice mix of colours together with muslin.

I was planning on doing a pinwheel border but when I started with it, I thought it would look a bit to messy, but I still had a lott of triangles left. So my Dear Husband started playing with the triangles last night and came up with this design. The outer border is 6 inch right now, but will be cut down to about 4 inches, but I liked to have a bit of a margin for attaching the hoop on when I am hand quilting.

So, please let me know what you think!

Barbara

The green monster sewingcaddy

Some time ago I posted about a green uggly sewingcaddy I had bought from a garagesale.

It looked like this:
As you can see it was just in need of a new fabric and some paint. When I was working on my japanese bag I fell in love with the fabric. So I orderd more fabric and put it on the sewingcaddy. So one day I got my brushes and fabric out and this is what it looks like now.

It now has it's own place with all my handsewing and quilting stuff besides my chair with my day-light lamp. I love it!

Today I am going to take a nice walk outside, it is really such great weather outside. Also am I going to put my blocks together from my Oceans Waves. Looking forward to see how the blocks will go together. It is always a very exciting stage of the quilt....

Computers are great.........................

when they work. And when they don't work there isn't much you can do without them. So now the problems are solved and I am back again.

I have done some cool things and even been on a cool quilting retreat, so check back soon and I will be updating this with some older events that I never got to post about...

One thing I did is this japanese bag. Isn't it cute? It was quite simple to put together and I hand appliqued, pieced and quilted it.

At the moment I am feeling really happy, since the snow has melted away and spring is in the air. It is really sunny, so I will go and sit outside for a while in the sun I think and enjoy my morning cup of tea! In the afternoon I will take my bike out for the first time in 4 months and take a trip to the local quiltshop...

Some snow and finished handquilting

This is a picture I took today when I went for a walk here in Sweden, it is about -9 C here during the day with a hard wind. The sky is so clear, wonderful walking weather!

Saturday night it started snowing and it didn't stop until Sunday afternoon. The cat loved it. He made tunnels in the yard and he was jumping high over it like a hare. In the afternoon DH hung some new seed balls in the trees for the birds.

Today I finished hand quilting the quilt I have been writing about for so long..but now it is done. Here is a close-up of the front and back of the quilting.

Unto the next quilting project!

Crazy Quilt nr 2

Yesterday I finished the second CrazyQuilt RoundRobin. This one was made of Ann-Christine. It was made in whites and other pale colors. She wished for a decoration in pastel colors.

I am really happy with it. I didn't decorated all the seams since I thought it would be to much. I really like the tree as well.

Today I will try to change my handles on the bag I made last week. And maybe I can even squeeze some quilting in :-))

14 boxes with what??

Hi!

As I wrote yesterday, I was thinking of reorganising my closet and some other things in my sewing room, which resulted in me having 14 boxes empty, and still using the same space in the closet and so on. I didn't move anything into another room or something like that. Even stranger..I could move in some of the batting I had in the storage... strange huh?

I think the biggest change was moving my fabrics onto my shelves instead of having it under the cuttingtable. Because I could move a lott of odd stuff in the drawers that were in boxes before and didn't really fill the boxes. Anyway...this is the way it looked:

And this is now!

Looks a lot better...right? I love the way I can see all my fabric. Yes this is all my fabric, not much huh? (not including Christmas and baby fabric)

I found some UFO's some days ago, so I put them unto my DesignWall to have a look at them and see what to do with them. This is how the wall looks now together with my 5 Ocean Waves blocks:

Big storm and Garage Sale

Hi!

Here in Sweden we had a big storm on Thursday and an even bigger one on Sunday night. 3 people died and more then 300.000 households are without electricity.

I was visiting IKEA when the storm came to our city. I took a picture of the dark skies that were approaching. (this was at 15:15, during the daytime, it was so dark.) It was a bit scary. Today the wind is still blowing like crazy and a new storm will hit us on Wednesday night. So our week has been a bit strange. The cat is not acting like himself either. I hope it will blow over soon...

A 10 minute walk from were I live, there is a hall were you can rent tables each weekend to sell all you old junk. So almost every weekend I just swing by to have a look. Sometimes you can find these great things like handmade lace, old tablecloths that are handembroiderd and other sewing things. This weekend I found this green monster.But I think I will be able to get it back to a more subtle state with some paints and fabrics!

I just love these old sewing caddies and seem to buy one every time I see one....*lol* I will not know where to put them soon!

Anyway I don't have much planned for today. I am not really happy with the way all my fabrics are stored, so I might take on the big project of reorganising it all... I'll let you know! I am still scrapbooking at the moment, I will show you my work when I am done..there is not much to see just now...

Scrapbook Mania

Hi!

Well ...I have been scrapbooking a little bit on and off, but now I am really hooked. I really like it. This was how my kitchentable looked yesterday after some scrapbooking with Weronica

Today I was looking at a scrapbookings shop website and saw they had a sale! 20 % of everything. I couldn't let a opertunity like that pass, so I called Weronica and we went to Stockholm. This is what I bought. I just love the pappers.

My best buy was this stamp. On the otherside of the metalic pieces, there is a screwhole were you but the handle of the stamp in. So you can stamp one letter, one line or 2 lines. The shiny metallic side which faces up on the photo is a magnet. So on the otherside of the letters there is a small magnet too. So you can create your own stamp and change it as often as you want. There are several fonts and other things to buy to this basic stamp maker. I love it! (it is made by a scrapbooking company called MM, Making Memories and comes in these tins)

For the patchworkguild I am a member of we had to comlplete 2 blocks with letters and something that starts with that letter. We are going to make an alphabetwallhanging with it and donate it to a childrends hospital when finished. I found these fabrics with prints that I just cut out and applicaded on.

Back to my scrapbooking...

(sorry if there are many spelling errors.....but bloggers spellingcheck is not working... BTW: did you know that the blogger spellingschecker doesn't recognise the words blog and blogger??..*lol*

A Bag day and gametime

Hi!

I made a new bag today. It is my own Design and made in a corderoykinda fabric. I liked the way it turned out. The corderoyfabric was a bit thick to make the biascord that goes all around the bag and made it pucker a bit. But if I don't find a good other normal cottonfabric to make the bias from to go around, I'll leave it like this..otherwise I'll will do some alltering.

My husband and I are totally hooked on a game called Carcassonne. We bought the game in Holland in Oktober, and now got and expansionkit for christmas, called the dragon, fairy and princess. Well, to make a long story short..I haven't seen much on tv the last 3 weeks..2 more expansions were bought and one is in order. In other words, great game, fun to play with 6 players...but even 2 players are a lot of fun, and games that are fun with just 2 players are hard to find. Here you can find more information about it.

Happy New Year!

Hi Everybody!

Yes, it has been a while since the last post. Been doing a lot of things, but not a lot of it had to do with any form of crafting.

But now the new year has started, new craft plans are made for the new year. One of them is trying to do more quilting. I have one top that is ready to be quilted, resting in the hoop. I really like the quilting part of making the quilts, but somehow there is always a new project that needs to be started, so the quilting is not going so fast. At the moment I am quilting this quilt:

3 days before Christmas me and the girls ( Helena, Sussie, Weronica and Lena) got together to make some Christmas flower arrangements. We had a lot of fun.

I have been working on my Ocean Wavesquilt. I started one in blue, but later changed to make one for myself in the colors I like. I now have a big box with 800 HST that will make the 64 blocks. I used the triangles on a role method, which was fast and accurate!

I am also working on the CrazyQuilt from Ann-Christine. She want hers to be only decorated in pastel colors. I am now making a tree/bush that I will decorate with silk roses.

I started this project as well. I just loved the layout of the stars, with room to do some nice quilting between them. I don't know anything about this quilt yet,...who is going to get it..how big it is going to get...so we will see when I get there..*lol* I am piecing it by hand.

Well I am off to my room and see what other things I can think of to do today.. I have been thinking of a special kind of bag and scrap booking...

Barbara