[slow craft] Constellation Quilts

Over the last few days, pictures of the most gorgeous constellation quilts have been popping up on my feeds. It is either the Baader-Meinhof effect or something else is happening in the universe!

I have finished my Foxy Four Patch Quilt top, have pinned to the back with batting and now I am just lamenting over the type of quilt stitching it needs. Hand or machine? Abstract or linear? I am undecided. I have some weeks up my sleeve, as the baby is not due until August.

But these gorgeous quilts kept on popping up and tempting me with their complexity and fascination.

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I love the detail that is in the hand quilting, as blogged about by Cashmerette Pattern blog.

It is a natural progression from Ellen Harding Baker's Solar System Quilt or Jimmy McBride's Stellar Quilts. These quilts take hours, but look at the detail in them.

If I wanted to quilt this constellation, then Haptic Lab have done most of the hard work for me, mapping the Southern Hemisphere and putting it onto a pattern for me.

Skymania has maps of the Southern Hemisphere Skies that you could easily transfer onto a pattern for quilting. You can use their tools to set a time and also invert colours so that it makes it easier to print out and copy.

I will add this idea to my "to make" pile. One day perhaps!

Jimmy McBride - Stellar Quilts

I was chatting to a friend on the phone this morning about quilting and patchwork and how the "average" customer just won't pay "the real price" for a patchwork quilt. We can probably blame our marketplace which is swamped with cheaply made products from sweatshops in asia.

In my restricted state, surfing the web, I came across this Jimmy McBride who makes different kinds of quilts and isn't afraid to charge for them.

This quilt is called Phobos V2 (one of mars moons) and is hand and machine quilted. It would have taken hours and the $3,800 USD price tag reflects it's uniqueness.

via etsy

I know someone would kill for a meteorite quilt like this one ...

The M64 (The Black Eye Galaxy) is quite impressive as well! At $2,200 USD, you'll have to wait a while to take receipt of this masterpiece as it is being included in an exhibition in Norway.

via etsy

Something a bit more affordable are the space battle pillows ... aren't they cute!

via Jimmy's etsy shop

Such a different kind of quilting with so much expression. I love the combination of applique, hand quilting and machine quilting. I wish one of the Australian Quilt Exhibitions would bring his work out here for us to look at.

Jimmy has an etsy shop StellarQuilts with lots of one off creations in it and a facinating blog that shows the process that he has used for some of his quilts.

enjoy!

Lilo's Patchwork Creations

One of Andreas Mother's friends that the travellers visited in Germany is an avid patchworker. Far more dedicated than I am, she does everything by hand.

Check out the handywork on this, all the quilting done by hand

I guess I am too impatient to do a whole quilt by hand. I like doing some of the top stitching by hand but not the whole lot.

Do you know the name of this quilt design? Does it have a name?

I am already concoting ideas on how I might be able to do it by machine ...

Finished Car playmat Quilt at last!

It really has been so cold here in Melbourne. Even though my market was indoors on Sunday I was still cold, probably symptomatic of the cold I am coming down with.

In between sales I sat and hemmed the binding around the Car playmat Quilt I have been painstakingly making for my daughter. Finally finished, I can sit back and bask in the loveliness of finishing yet another quilt.

Tori has already had fun playing with the quilt with her cars and walking up and down it like she would be walking down a street.

I chose a Michael Miller stripe for the bias. I still haven't quite got the hang of doing the binding as a continuous strip of fabric, so I sew all 4 sides separately and when stitching make sure that my corners are nice and neat. I like the look of a handstitched bias ...

For those who are interested, I used some strips from a Happy Campers Jelly Roll, some strips from a Breath of Avignon Jelly Roll, some Kona solids. The trains were a Japanese print I got ages ago. The roads are black homespun and the road signs are a print that again, I bought ages ago from GJ's in East Brunswick.

I backed the fabric with some 100% wool blanket weave, but if you wanted to re-purpose a blanket you could do that as well. I have a bit of woolen fluff coming through on the hand stitching, but I hope that with a wash it might disappear.

The car signs are appliqued on using the trapunto method that Don't look now uses in her quilts. Sewing the applique onto a batting back and then trimming around the applique.

The quilt was hand quilted used Perle in black and white. Now that I have a ironed out all the mistakes and perfected the round corners on the road, I am hoping to make another one, but this time it might be a bit quicker in construction!

This is how cold it is in Melbourne, both my female cats curled up with each other ...