Chevron Quilt Tutorial

I have been eyeing chevron (zigzag) quilts for a while now and the immanent arrival of my sisters baby gave me a great excuse to try this kind of quilt. I could also use plenty of the fabric left over from my Polaroid Quilt.
I looked for tutorials online but struggled a bit to understand them, so I thought I would add a quick bit of help for anyone who would like to make a similar zigzag quilt.

Chevron Quilt Tutorial:

To start I chose 2 contrasting fabrics, a white and a blue stripe cotton. Cut them into squares. 

Lay the fabrics on top of each other with the right sides facing each other. Then draw a pencil line from corner to corner. Trust me, you want to draw this line- I have tried eyeballing it, it it is waaaay too hard. 

Now, sew two straight seams on either side of the pencil line. I used the edge of my presser foot to guide me to keep the stitches parallel with the pencil line. I have done it in red thread to make it easier for you to see:

Cut down the pencil line to create two triangles:

Open out the triangles to form squares again. I ironed them open and I trimmed the corners to make them square. I don't think this is strictly necessary but it helped me to then start treating them as one piece.

And this is where it gets interesting. In the next two photo's I've shown you how these two triangles add together to form the pattern.

Lol! So, I only made 1 set of triangles but I used a bit of Gimp photo magic to show you how this all fits together to make the quilt:

And on to the quilt shots: (What a kind husband/clothes line!)

It was pretty overcast (yay UK!), so the colours are a bit odd but here is a close up of the quilt itself.

I used a lazy binding which is simply awesome. I folded over the backing towards the front quilt piece. (It's like wrapping a present but you fold it over from the back, making nice corners with an iron). I then top stitched the whole lot down. It saved me from the inevitable heartache of fighting with binding and is MUCH neater than I have ever achieved.

I used a deep red spotty fabric for the reverse and added my own label so the baby will know its from me in years to come.

I really like the spotty fabric as a backing because it shows off the quilting I did in the ditch of the seams: 

Thanks husband! No need to look so scary ;)

Leave a comment if you have any questions on how to make this type of quilt. It comes together far faster than expected and it feels awesome to see it take shape.

Happy Quilting!

Let's see all the Plush Dinosaurs you've made!

My Plush Dinosaur with Sewing Pattern has been one of my most read posts on this blog - Thanks to everyone who has linked to it! I promised to showcase the gorgeous dino's you made following the tutorial, so here we go, feast your eyes on the happy Dino goodness!

Confessions of a Stay-at-Home Mom made this single guy:

 and then a whole lot for a dino birthday party!

Over at Angelhearts Crafts we had a slightly different version with such a cute face!

This great one was created for a Toy Society drop by SewAud's Fun

Love the great photo of this cutie from Plushies and Crafts:

Bright orange from Flowerflame:

bozrena made this lovely smaller version over at Deviant Art:

And finally this dapper dude was made by Wiedźma Domowa:

Absolutely in love! Thank you to everyone, including these great sites for mentioning me:
http://superstinkyboys.blogspot.com/2011/06/dino-rama.html
http://prettyshabbyuk.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/collection-of-stuffed-animal-tutorials.html

Got a dino to show? Let me know in the comments here or on the Dino tutorial. You comments and links are a great encouragement for those of us who have blogs- keep it up lovely people! :)

Polaroid Quilt

I have a godson in South Africa who I don't get to see very often and so when we went back recently I wanted to make him something that would be nice for his mom now (he was just over 1 year at the time) and also for him as he grows up.

I have very strong memories of being sent to my bedroom to have an afternoon nap and spending (what seemed like hours) staring at the characters on my duvet covers or in the pictures in my books as I got older. For this reason I wanted to do a Polaroid quilt that would allow me to use many of the very cute fabrics with awesome designs but without the very clashing nature that I feel eye-spy quilts often have.

I found most of the cottons online on eBay and it was a relatively inexpensive way to collect the stash that I needed without having metres of fabric I cannot imagine using again.  I went with a much simpler method of applique, so that i didn't have to test my math and seam allowance skills to create the blocks. I am super lazy that way. I used possibly more batting than I should have too, since the unquilted spaces are rather poofy now!
As a side note- I also have no idea how big it is since I simply winged it. me and measuring don't really get on, as you may have picked up by now :)
Some completed shots held up by my dh in our not very sunny garden in the UK:

Typographic Subway Art of our Homes

I'm not normally one for 2 dimensional purely print art, but with the sheer explosion of these kinds of prints, I couldn't hold myself back any longer. It surprised me at how easy it is to do actually.
And since we have a bit of a prejudice against paid for proprietary software in our house it was done entirely through GIMP. I would suggest using many many layers (one for each bit of text) so you can move them, and change sizes etc independently to help with the design.

 
Also- I'm not sure if this helped, but I started from the bottom. I have read before that if you are trying to replicate something by drawing (like a portrait etc) you should turn the image upside down when you copy it so you can ignore/turn off the "this is a face" part of your brain. Which apparently helps you to focus more on producing a faithful copy than interpreting what you are doing and so getting in your own way. I think it helped to start from the bottom because it is something I would never do and it meant I wasn't in a comfort zone, so I was more creative. Who knows?

Incidentally: these are all place names that DH and I have lived in. Arcadia is the area we lived in when we first shared a flat. I toyed with colouring the words- something like yellow for me alone, blue for hubby and green for both of us- but it just looked a bit contrived. And whilst the print is semi-balanced in monochrome, with three colours it becomes a bit more than my little graphic design skills can deal with :)
Also dear dear husband told me that Irene, in the top right hand corner, looked evil in whatever colour I chose. I didn't want to agree, but the seed was planted....
This is doubly weird since Irene is a quiet little village which is so sweet that you definitely can imagine a horror movie waiting to be set there.
Edit: Here are two of the coloured versions (Made the right choice, eh?)