Please join me

Hi!

Please join me here:

Pink and Barbara


Barbara

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