January | 2019 | tesswyatt's Blog

I seem to have collected a lot of small irregular pieces of fabric and noticed that my quilting contacts on line do ‘scrappy’ quits.

A new pair of boots came in a black polypropylene bag and I wondered how it would stand up to being stitched so I used that as a base. it had a printed design on both sides – which is quite thick to stitch through – but it wouldn’t deter me from using another bag like it – unless the design was printed all over in a flat panel.

I decided to have a go at fixing my design to the bag using safety pins – because I am fed up of jabbing my self with straight pins

In this picture I have the bag inside a tray to make it easier to pin the bottom pieces to the fabric. Since I did this I decided I had to have quilting safety pins ….. they are fab – sometimes it is not worth trying to improvise.

After pinning I have different methods of tacking the denim shapes to the substrate. In this case because the bits of fabric were so small and oddly shaped I loose tacked all around the edges.

I like to work intuitively with my stitches – I started off making a few rainbow coloured circles – when I started adding white stitches as a background the circles started to loose impact – so I stitched around the circumference with a couple of layers of running stitch.

I was going to just add running stitch all over – but I got bored as is usually the case – so I started adding different patterns of stitches – All based on running stitch

The coloured circles were still getting lost – the white is a slightly thicker thread. So I went back over the centre of the circle- because the white outline was already in place I could see that the less dense stitching towards the edges was making nice tonal contrast – I left a couple of cm with a layer of stitches in a band as they were

But I did add another layer of green to the outside edge.

I used this technique on the other large circle too

I decided to add two more smaller coloured circles and am still filling in the bottom section of the bag. Next job is an apron …….

I am enjoying using the coloured threads in my Boro-inspired work. I am struggling to get my tension correct on all my circles. The more tense the TV show in the evenings the tighter my stitches get!

My daughter in law sent me some fab rainbow variegated cotton from the USA for a Christmas present. I am enjoying playing with the different colours

This is Aunt Lydia’s crotchet thread – size 10 in Mexicana colour way

I decided to use bigger pieces of fabric in my new quilt

I am not stitching my patterns within the confines of each piece of material so I thought why tack together so many little pieces?

I also changed my construction method. I usually tack around each piece of material. This time I did the tacking in stripes about 1.5cm apart. This is stopping the centres of the squares from moving as I stitch. It’s quite labour intensive but worth it in the long run.

I will definitely do it like this again.

I started off my design thinking that I would decorate a corner with coloured circles of different sizes – with a section of flowing stitches to break up the density of the pattern

The corner went well- but I hadn’t factored in the boredom of sewing in straight lines …. I had to stop and add more circles- I think I will add a few more up the centre section – I will keep you up dated …