Fabric Origami Basket

At our last meeting of 2024, our quilting group, the Rotary Cutters, made some fabric origami baskets.  Starting off with 2 squares and after folding and ironing multiple times, we ended up with a cute little basket.

Mine

Magda's

Hesmari's

Angeline's

and Louise-Marie's

If you want to make one yourself, just follow the instructions here.

Jelly Roll Rug

Our quilting group, the Rotary Cutters, decided on Jelly Roll Rugs as our first project for the new year.  I had two similar Jelly Rolls of 25 strips each and combined them into one long strip.

50m fabric strips

After this step, the fabric gets rolled onto a pvc pipe awaiting the next step.  Luckily my husband had a pipe laying around and asked our neighbor to saw 2.5" lengths which I could give out to all our group members at our meeting on Wednesday.

We are now awaiting our rolls of precut batting which are ordered from Temu to continue stitching the fabric and batting into a long tube.

In order to create the tubing, we also bought the Clover Fabric Tube Maker which just make the process so much easier than folding by hand.  

Now, you don't have to buy all these nice to have's.  You can buy your own fabric and batting and cut them to 2.5" and 2.25" respectively over the width of fabric.  If you want to get a Clover Tubing tool, they are available here on Clover and Stitch's page.

I joined a Jelly Roll Rug group on Facebook and found very handy tips as does Uniquely Mateo.

With the tubing you can create placemats, bags etc. in any shape or form with circular and oval shapes by far the favorite followed by rectangle mats.  One thing to remember though is that they will slide on tile or wooden floors without something attached to the back to keep them in place, but placing on carpeted floors, no problem with sliding and it can then be used on both sides.

Below is a beautiful bag created with the tubing.

So watch this space as we proceed with our individual projects.

How many irons does a quilter need?

Well obviously not only one.  When travelling to classes, small handy travel irons are a handy tool or purpose-built quilting irons which are still smaller but a lot more pricy.   

In a previous post I wrote about the three irons I used, but that has now grown to 4 after I was one of Fabric8's raffle winners which they held during their Craftcation in September 2024 and is now also the proud owner of a Prym mini steam iron.  

From left to right are the Russell Hobbs Slipstream steam generator which has a separate water tank,
an ordinary steam iron, a steam travel iron and last but not least the  little Prym.  

I have been using the Russell Hobbs Slipstream since 2012 with never any problems like ordinary irons which water tanks always starts leaking or the electric cords breaks.  The only problem I encountered was when it needed new water softener cartridges, none was locally available but with a daughter living in the UK, I was able to get 4 replacements from Amazon.

The travel iron will now revert back for that use.

The Prym iron is actually smaller than my hand but what a little beast this one is.  It heats up in no time and is extremely useful when ironing small pieced blocks and is real handy dandy with those corners and yes, it does have a water tank and steam!  Thank you Fabric8!

Decorating envelope and card with serviettes

One of our Rotary Cutter's quilting members is a very talented and accomplished artist in various mediums as well as sniffing out all kinds of interesting and/or fast projects on the various social media pages. 

Before all of us went our different directions over the holidays, she kindly showed us how to decorate an ordinary envelope into something truly special and make an accompanying card using an envelope, a serviette and cling wrap ironed between baking paper sheets with a hot dry iron.

She also demonstrated how to fold your own envelope from any size of paper.

I am really interested to know how the serviette technique will work on fabric and is definitely going to give it a try once back home.

Clover and stitch

During the first meeting of 2024 in February, friend Ansulet Swanepoel demonstrated a rather mind-blowing technique enabling quilters to turn any photo into an actual quilt.  Yes, any photo can be printed on fabric and incorporated into a quilt, but she developed a technique whereby the photo is broken up into squares or triangles in the size of your choice and then printed on 100% white cotton.  The only prerequisite being good, high-quality photos to prevent pixelation from happening. 

After requesting a specific layout, a preliminary design was done and send for my approval.

Happy with the layout, the actual breaking up of the photos into the individual shapes started.  The printed shapes already include a 1/4" seam allowance and all pieces are numbered to simplify the process of matching the correct pieces.  All that you need to do once receiving your printed pieces, is to cut them on the edge, match them up and start stitching.

After aligning all the bits and pieces and sewing them all together, I ended up with a beautiful, quilted photo.

Me and my husband decided to use our two grandsons, Aiden and Nathan's first school year photos and made each a cushion by adding matching black and white gingham.

So, if you have a special photo you want to convert into a really special keepsake, just contact Ansulet on +27 83 406 9461 or visit her website Clover and stitch for Clover sewing products, wool as well as a variety of other stuff.

Santa Claus

Visting the grandkids over Christmas time offered me the opportunity to embroider the Large Applique Standing Santa of Kreative Kiwi as they decorate their house for the holidays.

Although we personally do not participate in any of the festivities or put up any decorations, it was such a cute design, I just could not resist.  The design is reversable, so I used similar colors at the back.  Total length when done is 650mm/26.5".

Fabric used included chintz, bridal satin, polar fleece, faux fur, glitter vinyl and imitation leather. 

The design is digitized in such a clever way, that when the last stitch is embroidered, the whole piece is already assembled.  A really fun product.  In this post you can read about how I used Mrs Claus's pattern to embroider a granny for my kitchen.

This was the only piece I was able to finish when my Brother Innovis 4000 decided that it had enough and needed some rest.  Parts were ordered from the USA, so the machine should be up and running at the start of 2025 and I could embroider Mrs Claus as well.

Scrap to Art Quilt

Another one of the classes I did at the Voices-in-cloth quilt festival in Pietermaritzburg was how to turn your scrap fabric pieces into an art quilt with a very simple technique under the guidance of Mari Strydom using adding machine tape as illustrated in this video by Karen Brown of Just get it done quilts.

It was such a calming experience just adding pieces to the tape without thinking or having to worry about seam allowances, corners matching etc. and with me struggling with insomnia, after 2 days and nights, I had 40 strips done and ready to be compiled into a background which will become an art quilt in 2025.

This is also the kind of stitching where all those little bits of thread on various bobbins could be used without anyone be the wiser that different colors of threads were used.

Whilst stitching all the memories flooded back of the quilts that were made of these fabrics, such a satisfying journey.

I used 1" sasching strips of a neutral beige check fabric which enabled the rather thick seam allowances to flat lay against each other at the back rather than stitching the individual strips together thereby reducing the bulk significantly.  With all the seams, the quilt is not so surprisingly quite heavy.

After all the stitching, all that remained was to remove all those adding machine tape at the back, but with another sleepless night, I got that tedious task done as well.

With that, the scrappy part is finished whilst the art portion of the quilt will have to wait until 2025 after our upcoming trip to England visiting our daughter, son-in-law and two grandsons.