SewbySanne

As a member of the Dutch MQG I really love participating in the projects and challenges there are each year. Last year we were working with a different colour each month. Now that I’m thinking of it, I should really write about the project I made last year. I absolutely loved working on that one. This might also be because it was my idea to do colours for 2024. Anyway, this blog is about this years project: shapes.

So each month were are challenged to work with a different shape. As the current president of the guild I know what shapes are coming, so this gave me some more time to think ahead about my plans for this years project. The last two years I made a quilt in the size of a wallhanging, but this year I wanted to something a bit different. Because we get a new challenge each month, the idea of a calender came to mind and I started working with that idea. To make a mini quilt each month with the shape, roughly the size of a sheet of printing paper.

January

For the first month the shape was a circle, inspired by the long nights and short days I wanted to do something that represented that feeling. I found the perfect background fabric in a dark blue that reminded me of a starry night sky.

I added some circles and semi-circles to represent the moon in different stages. To still give the idea of a circle I handstitched the rest of the circle as an outline. This year I also want to play around with the different options my Bernina sewing machine has, so for January I added the letters with the embroidery option my B350 has.

Februari

For the month of February, the shape was ofcourse a hart. I thought I little bit about this shape, I wanted to not just do harts and make it super sweet, but play around with it a little bit. So I came up with the idea to use EPP diamonds and add 2 together to create a hart shape.

To even make it look less like a hart, I combined 3 harts to create a flowershape. I hand appliqued the shapes down and added some bigstitching with a thicker pink thread to quilt this page. To make the hartshape stand out more I added some hartshapes into the quilting. I also used the same thread to embroider the month on this calender page. Using a double thread to give it even more body.

March

The shape for march, this month is a square and as an added twist to make something in 3D. I immediately knew how I wanted to go about this challenge. This year I also want to explore how to design and draw my own patterns, so this shape was the perfect fit for it. Drawing a square isn’t that hard, so it was a good first (extra) challenge for myself. Remember back in school when we learned to draw 3D houses and blocks? That was my inspiration for this miniquilt.

I started by drawing 3 different squares in pink and added lines to create the cube and 3D effect. The next step was to play around with turning it into an FPP (foundation paper piecing) pattern. This took some figuring out, how to keep it as simple as possible and also trying to prevent bulky seams. It came together pretty well I think. Now onto sewing and piecing the different parts of the pattern.

For the quilting of this page, for me there was only one real option. Ofcourse that had to be a square pattern. Using my Hera marker I marked out the lines and quilted this page in using a grey 50wt thread. For the machine embroidery of the month I used a 12wt variegated thread by Sulky. I Added a binding using the same fabric as I did for the front of the cubes and now the first three pages of my calender are done.

I would love to hear what you think of this project, and if you have any inspiration or suggestions in techniques I could try out the coming months.

Hope you have a creative day, Sanne