Hopfaldera

Hot pads à la Suzuko

I made two hot pads and/or potholders. I was inspired by two books by Suzuko Koseki: Patchwork Style and Natural Patchwork. These are great books, with lovely inspiring images and doable patterns. Suzuko is a patchwork and fabric celebrity: she designs fabrics that are very popular, lovely, and pretty hard to find (although it is possible on Etsy and her own Japanese website).

While I was making these pads, my sewing machine broke down.... A loud noise from the bobbin holder and lots of heaped up thread. OMG, it was a scary moment, because I can not live without my machine, really not! I took a deep breath, read the manual a bit, and screwed the machine open. Okay, there was a lot of fluff there, so I cleaned it out, even using the vacuum cleaner (the manual suggested this), and after that the machine worked like a charm! Pfff, maybe I should clean it more often... haha, maybe!

Haus Sweet Haus

I made this stuffed house toy from a pattern from Wee Wonderfuls: 24 Dolls to Sew and Love by Hillary Lang. I made the front Friday afternoon, and just finished it with the backing, ribbon gusset and stuffing this morning. Not hard at all! It´s a little break from making Farmer´s Wife Quilt blocks. I have about 10 new ones finished eventhough the quiltalong is officially on a break. I´m just always afraid I´ll get behind eventually so I frantically am trying to make up for that in advance. I´m sure I´ll take a break from them in the future, but for now I have 3 new blocks planned out fabric-wise.

I wanted to say Happy New Year too. Happy Chinese New Year: Xinnian kuai le! May the dragon fire us up to do wonderful things this year!! I'm planning plenty of them, not only Farmer's Wife's blocks, I'll tell you later.

I also made one!

A Blogger's Choice Fat Quarter Bundle. 

There is a contest going on, on the Quokka Quilts blog. You can select 12 prints and 3 solid fabric colors from the Fat Quarter Shop and then you might win your own chosen bundle! It was fun to choose the fabrics, I just chose what I liked and what I thought would look good together.

Here's my bundle:

 

Resolutions

 

My quilting resolution for this year is to finish these projects. They include things that I have finished piecing and need to quilt, two are blocks that are made for me by fellow bee members and that I want to make into quilts, and a couple are in progress projects that I really want to finish.

If all works out as I see it now, I will have 7 quilts and 2 mini quilts at the end of it. Cool!!

Happy New Year!!!

Happy 2012 everyone!

Here are some photos of our New Year's Eve. One before midnight and one after.

 

 

The winner!!! (plus some quilt blocks)

Here is the big announcement of the winner of my giveaway prize: Jojoebi won! 

Thank you to all 72 commenters for taking the chance to win! I had a lot of fun reading about all your different inspirations for sewing. And thanks to Sew Mama Sew for organizing the Giveaway Day event!

I'll show you some of my own recently finished sewing: the blocks I made for his quarter of the 4x5 Bee. I followed this tutorial but enlarged everything so I ended up with 12" finished size blocks. If you want to do this and you can't figure out the measurements, contact me (through the comments) and I'll tell you what I did.

This is the block I made for myself. This quarter my colors are all shades of purple with all shades of gray.

Giveaway Day December 2011

*** Comments are now closed. The winner will be announced and contacted soon. ***

Today is Giveaway Day again! See more giveaway posts on the Sew Mama Sew blog. If you came here through Sew Mama Sew: Hi! You're very welcome here on Hopfaldera. Maybe you'd like take a look around at my other posts if you have time. My name is Muriël and I live in The Netherlands. I love quilting, sewing and making ceramics. Today I am giving away a few goodies to inspire you to decorate your world; inspiration starts with little sparks, and I hope these are just the things for you!

This is what you can win: a Pip Studio note book, a piece of cute ribbon, and a set of iron-on appliqués from the famous Dutch department store Hema. I will also add a bag of fabric triangles (cut-offs for me, inspiration for you; this includes some designer fabric and Japanese fabric but in very small pieces), and a larger piece of cute Dutch fabric.

What do you need to do to win? Please leave a comment (one entry per person) on this post, telling me about your latest sewing inspiration. You could also tell me what you would write in the note book if you won, or what you would use the ribbon and appliqués for. Make sure you leave your e-mail address in the appropriate box or in the comment, so I can contact you if you win!

The giveaway will officially close on Friday December 16 at 5 p.m. PST (that is 2 a.m. Saturday morning where I live, so I will close the comments when I wake up, giving you a little more time to grab your chance). I will let a random number generator pick the winner.

Good luck to everyone!

Welkom - Welcome

Ben je hier gekomen via de QR code in de bibliotheek in Leiden? Welkom op mijn blog! Kijk even rond, en klik of tap op wat je maar wil, misschien zie je iets leuks. Vlak hieronder zie je een selectie van mijn keramiek. De rest van mijn blog gaat over alles dat ik maak en is in het Engels. No problem, right!?

Here is a selection of the ceramics I make on Friday mornings. I displayed some of my work in the library in town, and stuck a QR code directing people to my blog, next to it.

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www.flickr.com

Still busy at the farm

I'm still plowing along at my Farmer's Wife Sampler quilt blocks. I have made 53 blocks so far. There are 111 in total, so I only need three more to pass the half way point, pretty good! It's still fun to pick and choose fabric combinations for these blocks. And making the blocks: some are hard, some are easy, some are fun, some are boring. It's great to have that goal of 111 to work towards, and I'm learning a lot.

Here is #48, Homeward Bound. For the most part made with fabric from a tunic that Damaris put on the recycle pile because it was too small.

And these three are partly made with fabric I got as a gift from my friend Monique.

And here is the whole pile of 53 blocks. See them up close on Flickr.

Cocorico October

The October theme in the Cocorico Bee was Orchard! Annabel asked for blocks that were inspired by orchards, and that were 12.5" by 16.5" in size. In this post I'll try to show how I went from my inspiration to the finished block. I didn't take photos during the hardest bits, because I was sweating and sewing, and not thinking about blogging. But I hope the process will be a bit demystified :-)

This picture was my inspiration. It comes from a little booklet I still have from when I was a child. It has German rhymes in it, and cute drawings.

I asked Frederik to make an enlargement of the book illustration at his office. I used that to make a first draft of the pattern. What I did was put see through pattern paper on top of the photo copy and try to recreate the drawing with a ruler. My thinking was that if I can draw a straight line with a ruler, I can also sew a straight line there.

Soon I had to simplify the apple core with the pips, because sewing five was just too intricate.

I felt the magic number to show variety was three, so three pips I drew!

And this is the final pattern that I made. You can see I played around with different stalks.

Now comes the part where I don't have a lot of photos. I did show a sneak peek on Flickr here. But otherwise I was either procrastinating, drawing partial patterns, sick, or sewing...

Here is a photo of the back of the block just after I finished the piecing. You can see that I split the pattern into five sections that I pieced separately. This was necessary for inward pointing curves, very hard to explain, but you'll understand as soon as you try something like this...

Detail of the pattern sections. I made little notes about which fabric to use. Very helpful during the process, where you get caught in the details and loose the bird's eye view for a while.

And here you can see the enlarged illustration and the finished piecing. I was so proud when I got to this point. Proud enough to think about my camera again.

And here I show off the finished block. Including side borders, embroidery and an appliquéd leaf.

Bye bye say the happy pips!! I hope Annabel likes what I made for her. It was great to work on!