Making a Curtain - Part One

We have discovered that one reason that our house is so cold is the fact that there is a draft coming in from the front door. This is not an old door, it is a brand new PVC affair that should be fine. But it's not. We have decided that the best thing to do in this case is to create a nice heavy curtain and cover the problem. We don't tend to use the front door, it being a farm, most people enter form the farm yard side, so there isn't a thoroughfare of people coming and going. We decided it was cheaper to make our own curtains and so bought some material.

Sable helped with the laying out of the lovely striped blue material on the living room floor.

She however didn't hang around to help me pin the thermal lining on the back! Now just for the record I have never made lined curtains before so this is all new to me, so if you are an expert curtain maker please look away now....

All I had to do now was sew the pieces together and then it was time to think about how to hang it!!

So now I have two projects on the go, one quilt and one curtain!!

Making a Quilt - Part Three

Once the whole top of my quilt was made I pinned it to the padding for the inside and the backing (I have chosen a nice pinky purple with ducks on!!! Ahhhhh!!!!)

I then cut and created a nice long piece of fabric for the binding and set to work trying to sew it all together.

The bind is now sewn in place but it still needs to be sewn on the back, which I will have to do by hand.

After this I just have the quilting part to do. I intend to 'Stitch in the Ditch' around all of the little squares. I am not going to try anything fancy on this first quilt. Just want to get to grips with the basics! I am still not sure that the block fabric isn't a bit fussy but I think it is looking better than I imagined so I have decided not to dwell on it any longer!!

Making a Quilt - Part 1
Making a Quilt - Part 2

Making a Quilt - Part Two

For the next stage I decided to continue with the chopping up and rebuilding of the little/large squares. Here is my army of little squares all ready to be stitched and pressed. I discovered that I seemed to have a lot more of one fabric than I did of the others. Hence the reason all the little squares are laid out here. I was concerned that if I just picked at random I would end up with a square at the end which was all the same fabric!! I did mess up the combinations once or twice, particularly when the cat chose to 'help' and came skidding across the table on a fabric sled!!

I know that I am supposed to 1/4 inch seams and I am not an expert on the sewing machine. So although my machine has a mark for 1/4 inch seams I had to add the addition of some electrical tape to mark the line all the way down!

This might look to you like the handles for a table football game - but you'd be wrong! It is a state of the art fabric location and separation device! I had cut the strips that I was going to use for the blocks of colour and they needed sorting so I got them in the right order!

Soon I had a centre of little squares with a border of block colour. Just needed to sew all those little squares on the outside!

The borders took sometime to cut out as I was still working with my tape measure as both measuring and straight line drawing device!! It was also at this point when I wondered if my block fabric was perhaps a little fussy, but it was still nice fabric so I was happy enough!!

Making Quilt Part 1

Making a Quilt - Part One

After watching a half hour show with an amazingly excited woman making quilts on Rural TV I decided that that was something that I needed to have a go at! Now I have never made a quilt before in my life so I had no experience but I did know how to sew two pieces of material together and I do know how to look up information videos on the Internet! So nothing was standing in my way!

I headed to eBay and got myself some pre-cut squares in nice shades of purple. We are thinking purple for the living room so this should fit in perfectly! I found some nice 6 inch squares in a range of purple patterns (30 squares in total). I came up with my pattern which was basically, some in the middle, then a block colour, then some more squares, finish with another block colour.

But me being me I don't do things by halves so I decided it would be better to cut the big squares into small squares and then sew them back together as multi-coloured patches. Now bear in mind through all of this my entire kit for cutting material consisted of a tape measure, a pair of scissors and a pencil (HB I believe!). But soon my big squares were little squares and I began the process of sewing them all together into big squares again.
First I sewed them into pairs....

Then into squares...

I did manage to pick up a few tricks online about pressing seams into a kind of pinwheel shape so that everything lies flat. i did find out though that you have to be sure to do them all the same way, otherwise things get a bit weird!!

Once my big squares were sewn up I sewed them together and behold....

The centre panel for my quilt!

Tune in again for the latest update...