Hollow Jewels - November Island Batik Quilt

Note, the fabrics for this project were given to me by Island Batik as part of the Island Batik ambassador program.

For November, the Island Batik ambassadors were asked to find a tool to use in the creation of their quilts and after a lot of time spent considering different tools, I chose freezer paper. I've had a roll of it for ages, but hardly ever use it. You can read my post about the magic that is paper piecing with freezer paper here. Spoiler alert...I loved it 😊 I have a feeling I'll be going through the roll of freezer paper a lot faster from now on.

Here is the quilt I made with those paper pieced blocks. Unfortunately, it's still only a quilt top, though I did get it basted after I took this picture. I really thought I'd be on track to have a finished quilt before the end of the month, but that's not going to happen. Where do the days go???

I had a crazy hard time coming up with a name for this quilt. Thankfully, the quilt pattern designers group on FB has some wonderfully creative people who suggested a lot of fun names. Dragon Eyes was one of my favourites, mostly because I've always loved dragons, but in the end I decided to go with Hollow Jewels instead. I love that it references both the coloured jewel shape and the black diamond in the center of the jewels. I hadn't really considered how that diamond makes the jewel look hollow, but now it really stands out to me.

The colours I chose were inspired by a sweater Silas, the 4 year old I babysit, wore one day. His parents went to Peru over the summer and brought back this sweater for him. I loved the colours and couldn't wait to translate them into a quilt.

I think this teal is my favourite Island Batik fabric. I've used it in at least three quilts now and I'm very happy to still have some left.

I love all of the other fabrics, too!

While assembling the quilt top, I was also thinking about what I would use for the backing. I honestly tried to convince myself to use the leftover yardage to piece a back, but I couldn't muster much enthusiasm for the idea. I didn't want to do the math to figure out if I had enough of these fabrics to make a back that would be big enough. Plus I didn't want to put in the work to sew that many seams. Now, this makes no sense whatsoever because I'm perfectly happy to sew quilt tops with a bazillion seams, but anything more than two seams for a backing feels like too much work. Go figure! I've decided that, as much as I admire pieced backs when other quilters make them, they're not my style. I had enough Island Batik solid grey to make a backing with only one seam, so that's what I did. As a bonus, the quilting, which will be in thread to match the fabrics on the front, will really show up on the solid grey 😊

This quilt will be a wedding gift for Paul's nephew Brandan next summer. Brandan was born in 1998, when I was just learning to quilt and my second ever quilt was a baby quilt for him. Strangely enough, that quilt also had bright colours on a black background. I messaged my sister-in-law a while back to see if she still had the quilt and she sent me this picture. Obviously, bright colours on a black background works with very different styles!

I am working on the pattern for Hollow Jewels and I hope to have it ready to release by the time I have the quilt finished. We'll see which one I end up finishing first!

Have you ever made a quilt with a black (or really dark) background? On another note, what's the strangest thing you've used as inspiration for a quilt design or colour scheme?

Faith Endurance

Devotion for the Week...

I have written about endurance before, based on Paul's words in Romans 5:3, but today I want to look at it again, in a slightly different way. James wrote "Dear brothers and sisters, when troubles of any kind come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy. For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing" (James 1:2-4).

I tend to think of endurance as being either a physical thing, like when we do some kind of hard activity and our bodies are able to continue doing it, or an emotional thing, like when we have the patience to get through some hard circumstances. James' words, though, seem to be addressing a different kind of endurance. He writes about our faith being tested and endurance growing, which sounds to me like it is the endurance of our faith that needs to grow. Our faith in God is our firm belief that God not only exists, but that He cares for us and is in control of everything, which certainly sounds like something we should have in abundance.

The hard-to-face truth is that endurance only grows when it is used and practiced. We can't will or wish it into being and no one can gift it to us. My running endurance grows the more I run. Our patience grows the more we deal patiently with difficult people or situations. Our faith grows when we trust God through hard things.

As I said last week, we all want the hard things to happen to other people - preferably ones we don't know. We don't want to have to deal with anything that will test our faith, but those things will happen whether we want them or not. James tells us that when hard things do happen, we should consider it 'an opportunity for great joy' because they will make our faith endurance grow. Not because the circumstances themselves are cause for joy, but because the growth of our endurance is cause for joy.

Background quilt is Divided

Jesus said, "I am with you always, even to the end of the age" (Matthew 28:20). When things are going well we can forget to look for Him, to notice the evidence of His provision for us and to rely on Him. When things aren't going well we are reminded that our own strength is not enough and that He is always there.

Is your faith being tested by hard things right now? If it is, take comfort in knowing that, whatever you're dealing with, God is with you through it all. One day (hopefully soon!) the trouble you face will be over and your faith will be stronger because of it.

Tiny Shirts

Is there anything cuter than baby clothes?

It turns out that baby clothes you've made yourself are even cuter than clothes you might buy at a store. Or maybe they're just more satisfying 😊

I used the free Wee Lap Tee pattern from Patterns for Pirates for these shirts that are a shower gift for a friend. There's also a free pattern for pants and a beanie hat, so you could make a complete outfit for baby if you wanted. I made the three month size and loved the adorable-ness of all the small pieces even before they were sewn together.

The bonus in making baby clothes is that they're so small you don't need much fabric. These two shirts are actually made from three old shirts of mine. The shirts had a couple of small stains, but most of the fabric was still perfectly good and I hated the thought of just throwing them out. A little careful cutting later and the fabric can become something new.

Just look, the board book is almost as big as the shirt! As a side note, Hippos Go Berserk is still my favourite baby book to read. This is my third copy after we wore one out and the replacement vanished after a couple of years 😊 Nathan was very amused to discover I can recite it from memory. We won't discuss how many baby books I could recite...or how quickly I forget things I'm supposed to do if I don't write them down.

I used my serger for these, even though it still kind of scares me. I sewed the seams on my regular sewing machine, then finished the seams on the serger, being careful to keep the seam allowance just to the left of the cutting blade so none of it was actually cut off, since that's the part that scares me, lol. What if I make a mistake and the seam allowance has already been trimmed? How do I fix it then?? That being said, I think that if I make these again I will actually trim the seam allowance a little, especially the shoulder seam, since serging them made them feel a little stiffer and I think that would be less noticeable if the seam allowance were smaller. Maybe. We'll see if I'm right whenever I try it out.

The edge of the seam allowance does look nicer when it's finished, even if my serging skills could still use work.

The shirts aren't perfect, but I'm guessing the new baby won't mind the small imperfections. The most noticeable is the small pleats I had to make in the neck bindings because the raw edge of the binding wasn't caught in the seam. Rather then pick out the whole seam, re-pin and sew again I opted to just pick out a little right at the binding, then push it into the seam and stitch it up. Imperfect, certainly, but it worked!

I'm really having a lot of fun playing around with sewing clothes 😊 As a bonus, clothes are generally very fast to finish, especially when compared to quilts! Sewing these took one evening, though I had all the pieces cut out prior to that. Had I been familiar with the steps of the pattern, it would have been even faster.

If you're interested in learning to make clothes, but scared to start, check out my post Quilters Can Learn to Sew Clothes!

I have quilts I can't wait to finish (and more I haven't even started yet!), but I'll also be planning what my next garment sewing project will be. What will you be sewing next?