Hopfaldera

A secret quilt...

The last few weeks I had a big secret! Sinterklaas (the Dutch Santa whose birthday we celebrate on the evening of December 5 by giving each other gifts, instead of at Christmas; I wrote about him before) asked me to make a special gift for Damaris, my fourteen year old daughter. It's always a big secret who is making for who, so I had to go about my mission in total secrecy. 

just before wrapping

I found this tutorial for a Houndstooth quilt and bookmarked it in a secret place on our family iPad. I ordered fabric from Simply Solids in the UK: Kona Pepper and Kona Orchid. Good thing that the package came while I was home alone! I cut and sewed everything without leaving a trace, I was careful not to leave black and light purple threads and off-cuts where everyone could see them; I even wrapped them before throwing them in the bin. Even the time to wash the quilt was carefully planned so no one would see anything tumbling about. The hardest part was not being able to share when I had it done: of course I wanted to jump around showing off the quilt to everybody but I couldn't.

finished size 45" x 45" 

Then I wrapped the quilt in a special surprise package. It is part of the tradition to craft a special wrapping, always accompanied by a poem with a some compliments and few jokes about the person receiving the gift. I made a "Chanel bag" (Damaris loves fashion) and in the poem I talked about how hard she always works at her homework, but that she always gets so cold at her desk and that Sinterklaas saw all that and thought she needed a fashionable quilt.

the "Chanel bag" with chocolate C's as the logo

When Damaris unwrapped the quilt she was so surprised that she hadn't even known that I was working on it! And she loved it, so that was great!! Sinterklaas, the best time of the year!!!!

this is the back of the quilt

FQ London 2012

Where to begin?! Last weekend we went to London. Of course I went for the Fat Quarterly sewing/quilting retreat, and Frederik, Damaris and Emil went with me. Afterwards Damaris and I said to each other: we have had this much excitement before but not in such a short time. I'm still a bit quiet about it, it was so wonderful, overwhelming, fun, like nothing else! And we're tired of course.

Damaris blogged about her experiences on her Dutch fashion blog (she's 14 and has this blog with her best friend). 

So now for my experiences. I'll start with some photos and then hopefully the words will come.

We flew to London from Rotterdam on Friday. It took only 4 and a half hours from door to door, which I thought was incredibly fast! We had dinner at Jamie Oliver's Barbecoa restaurant, great food and fun!

Royally approved!

Then, on Saturday morning I went to the Baden-Powell House to the retreat. I was greeted by lots of friendly and familiar faces, the nerves left immediately. The main hall was already filled with lots of people and the great opening game was to talk to six people whose names I had on a card, and get their autographs. It was a great trick to break any ice that was left, and I had soon met all kinds of people that I had only known through the internet up to now. John (Quilt Dad) made a little opening speech and then some classes and other activities started. I first went to swap some nice FQs of fabric.

This is what came home with me

After some coffee and chatting to people, my first workshop started: the Design Challenge. John, Brioni and Lynne talked about the design process for the Fat Quarterly book and showed some samples from the book. Then we got some short assignments (like draw a block with squares and rectangles), did some drawing and talked about what we had come up with. This was a fun exercise that I want to do more often. I usually start by looking at fabric, or with a theme.

These were my sketches

After this it was lunch time (actually it was Sample Swap time, but Vicky and I missed that a little bit and upset Trash's plan somewhat (sorry!), all was fine in the end though (I hope for you too, Vicky!))

 

I swapped my samples with Annabella, Linda, Lorna and John and got lovely gifts back from them. Thank you all so much!

After lunch I was in Lynne's class to make a Union Jack pillowcase using foundation paper piecing. Lynne was a fun teacher and had made an excellent pattern for us. Working in a different place than usual and with a different machine than at home is not easy, so I made a quarter of a Union Jack with some Lotta Jansdotter and Meadowsweet fabric. I will definitely finish this at home because it will be a great souvenir from the Jubilee weekend spent sewing!

In the main hall some exciting things were going on. One of them was that a representative from Liberty came to show us their new range of quilting weight fabric, Liberty Lifestyle. This was just awesome! Such beautiful prints! I cannot wait to buy them all! I received a pretty tote bag from the Liberty lady (as did a lot of people).

Liberty Lifestyle

Liberty totebag and contents of the goodie bag I received from the FQ team

Another thing was the Iron Man challenge. I was in group 5 and with Lucy, Amy, Tammy, Elisabeth and other that joined us we worked on designing and making a quilt top.

Our finished Iron Man quilt top

Of course we had to swap our ugly fabric too. Some were really ugly, but some were okay. This is what I ended up with:

what do you think: ugly or alright?

After this was the raffle. There were lots of prizes, I was impressed. My family had already come to have dinner with me and they saw me win a huge prize: A fat quarter set of Blitzen by BasicGrey, really good!! Thank you!! I want to make a quilt with stars from it, because it is Christmassy fabric (but I won't promise it will be done this Christmas...).

my super prize!!

During dinner I almost fell asleep, so after that I only went back to collect my things and went straight to bed after that!

The next morning Frederik, Damaris and Emil got up very early to go to the Harry Potter Studios, so I had breakfast by myself. I think I saw some wizards posing as muggles in the breakfast room though... Then back to the retreat!

First I had a freezer paper piecing class with Kerry. She is in the Cocorico bee too, and she's just really good, technically and creatively!! It was fun to meet her, and learn tricks to conquer the dreaded y-seam (just do it, step by step, leave the paper on until the end, use tick marks), and it worked! I only finished one block, because I sewed by hand (not my favorite thing). And also because I had a fun chat with Ulrike (Floh) and Mary about our various bee experiences. At home I turned my little block into a pincushion.

After another great lunch I chatted for a while with Nicole, Tacha and Linda. And I listened in on Lucie Summers porthole technique class. Then we found out that the frame purse class from Katy had started and we rushed upstairs. I managed to finished my frame purse, and I was so happy! It's really not that hard (Katy explained it step by step), and the result looks great! Next day at home I ordered frames, glue and piping cord from U-handbag to make some more of these purses.

After finishing the purse and saying goodbye, I went back to the hotel and waited for my husband and kids. They had managed to see a glimpse of the Jubilee boat pageant, and they made it back in time too. I heard all about their wonderful time at Harry Potter in the taxi to London City airport. We made it in time for the plane back home and Nicole, who had taken the tube had luckily also made it through the rush, she was on the same plane.

Okay, once I got talking, the words did come; this is a very long post. I want to thank everybody for making the retreat so wonderful: the FQ team, the teachers, all the other helpers and all my fellow participants!!! Let's do it again next year! I loved it!!

 

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.

Blackberries

Last week when they took the boat out after dinner, Frederik and Emil found a blackberry bush. The bush can only be reached by boat so it was still full of berries!! Frederik and Emil ate a large dessert of them, but the next day they went back with containers and brought home more than a kilo of super sweet dark blackberries.

This is what we did with them:

eat them just like that

make dark purple ice cream

make two pots of jam (the only thing I photographed)

make syrup for lemonade (we googled for recipes, found only vague ones, then made something up ourselves)

bake blackberry muffins (using a blueberry muffin recipe by Nigella Lawson)

We had the greatest time!!

This week

Now, what did I do? I mainly worked on assembling the quilt top with the blocks I made in the Block-a-palooza Quilt Along. I have done a bit more than you can see in this photo, but here you can see what it is going to look like. The sashing will be light gray with light pink dots.

 

The other main activity this week was helping Emil make a project report about the Mustela Erminea (ermine or stoat in English). It was fun, but also hard work, for Emil, and for me too.

This is what I did in my ceramics class:

 

  

 

And also this week I was so (soooo) jealous! Jealous of American quilters who can just go to a Jo-ann store and get the new fabric by Denyse Schmidt (see some of it here). I love her older Hope Valley fabric line (I made a quilt from it for Damaris), and also loved her Katie Jump Rope, but I only ever owned two FQ's from that line. This week I saw her new fabric popping up on Flickr and blogs, and wanted it!!! Unfortunately Jo-ann doesn't ship internationally! Luckily some people understood us Europeans and others who can't go to Jo-ann, and listed the fabric in their Etsy shops. I was lucky enough to snatch up a fat quarter bundle of the complete line from a shop of one of my Flickr contacts! I can't wait.....

 

 

World Wide Christmas Toy Drop 2010

I participated in the World Wide Christmas Toy Drop by the Toy Society this weekend. This is the toy I dropped.

 

I made this little snowman by using the Sleepover Pals template from Hillary Lang's book Wee Wonderfuls: 24 Dolls to Sew and Love and leaving the arms and hairdo off.

 

My drop is documented here on the Toy Society blog.

If you want, you can still participate, because the Christmas Drop will continue all this week before christmas. Again go to the Toy Society blog for information. Also if you want to be a toydropper another time of year!

 

Liberty

A couple of weeks ago we visited London! It was Damaris's and Emil's first visit so we went to all the touristic highlights (or drove past them on the Hop on Hop off bus). Of course we also went to the big department stores, Selfridges, Harrods. The best shop though was Liberty!!

 

Of course I got myself some fabric. But mainly I drooled on all the fabric that I couldn't take home, the wonderful Christmas displays, and the decor all around the store. It reminded us of the wonderful shops in Diagon Alley in Harry Potter. Especially the carved wooden owl that we saw. Sorry, taking photos did seem like a good idea... We did take a quick snapshot in the elevator. Can you some of the woodwork?

 

 

Binding

Tying Emil's quilt is going well! 169 of the 325 knots have been tied... I made binding for the quilt when I needed a little break from the orange knots. I decided against the orange binding idea, because it was a bit too much, and because the orange fabric that I had was not very nice. So I made mossy green binding!

I love how it looks all rolled up!

 

Now I'm motivated to tie the other 156 knots!!

Starting finishing

I finished all my bee commitments for this month (I'll show the blocks soon), so now it's time to start with the last lap of making the pinwheel sampler quilt for Emil.

First of all, basting the three layers of the quilt together with safety pins.

 

That step is done. Next is the process of quilting. I decided to tie this quilt with knots of orange embroidery thread.

 
 

In the meantime I'm working on a label for the back of the quilt, and after that I'll make orange binding. A lot of orange, I know, but Emil loves orange, good thing for a Dutch boy!!

 

 

My creative space 26

Today I'm working on two different quilty projects:

I'm adding sashing around the quilt top I made for Emil, to make the quilt just a little bit bigger.

 

And I'm quilting along with Aneela in her Pickledish Quilt Along (you can see a pickledish quilt block in the button in my side bar). I decided to make the mini quilt version (just one block) to learn this technique which includes sewing curved lines, scary...!!

I have picked out different prints from the City Weekends layer cake I got a while back. These prints are so pretty, I love them! And I bought a very light colored denim for the background.

 
 

Somehow this is my very favorite print, although I love them all.

 

More creative spaces filled with eye candy at Kootoyoo!