Making a Linen Quilt | My First Quilt

29.07.2023

I’m making my first quilt. It’s a 90cm by 90cm lap quilt, and the quilt top is made with linen remnants I bought as a bundle from an online fabric store for £5. The bundle was made up with scraps and ends of rolls, and it included a mix of colours – indigo, burnt orange, oatmeal, stone and slate. It’s a mix of Irish linen and washed linen, and I still have plenty left over after cutting the squares for this quilt. Some fibres feel coarser than others, but it’s all medium weight. When I bought the linen last autumn I didn’t necessarily have a quilt in mind, but as I was going through my mum’s craft supplies and helping Dad tidy the house shortly before Mum’s hospitalisation and move into dementia nursing care, I found a 90cm by 110cm piece of quilt wadding in her craft box. Without being able to ask her, but knowing she liked natural fibres too, and judging by the look and feel of it, I think it’s cotton. Dad says she had planned to make a quilt for one of my nephews, and the pile of cotton fabric in children’s prints confirmed it. Whilst the children’s prints went to a charity shop, I brought some of Mum’s other fabrics home with me and thought about trying my hand at quilting to make use of the wadding I had found. I’ve never made a quilt before, but I know how to sew.

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Sewing |

ZW Cropped Shirt | Birgitta Helmersson | Zero Waste Sewing

14.07.2023

As a recent sewing project I made the ZW Cropped Shirt by Birgitta Helmersson. It’s a “zero waste” pattern that rather than printing and pinning, you draw onto your fabric. It’s a series of rectangles that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, eliminating waste. The pattern is one size, and fits a range of body sizes. I wear a UK size 8 in blouses and dresses, and the finished garment measurements looked too big for me, so I cut it smaller. This resulted in a few unused rectangles of fabric, but I plan to put them to use in quilting and for making skinny hair scrunchies, so they won’t go to waste.

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Sewing

Etched Behind Eyelids | May 2023

31.05.2023

Now that the weather is warmer it’s possible to take Mum out in her wheelchair when we visit her. The nursing home is lovely, but it’s noisy (dementia homes always are) and hot, so it’s nice to be able to take her somewhere calm and bright and give her a change of scenery too. I think she enjoyed herself, she kept saying “lovely lovely” and only “horrible horrible” when I was pushing her over the tactile paving at the pedestrian crossing.

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Etched Behind Eyelids |