Welcome

Welcome to Vicarage Quilts - thank you for visiting.

I offer several services: longarm quilting, patchwork and appliqué workshops and small items made to commission. In the past I've also made quilts to commission as well as Church or School banners for Walking Days and permanent display.

Please visit the pages listed on the right hand side to find out more and email me with any queries.

Saturday 23 March 2013

Butterflies table runner

 
Our son went away on Thursday, on the French Exchange with school.  A gift for his host family was in order, so I made a table runner inspired by the quilt made by Rita of Red Pepper Quilts.  I worked out a way to machine appliqué the butterfly bodies and wings rather than piecing them: if you look closely at the photo above you can see the stitching close to the edges of each piece.



I think I'll be making another butterfly quilt in the future - I love the shapes in it for some reason and once I'd worked out my technique it came together really quickly - I cut the blocks, made the blocks, pieced them together and quilted the runner last Sunday between Church and suppertime.  (Not that I was last-minute planning what to send to France!)


This is my favourite block - the Liberty lawn I used for the butterfly bodies looks good with all the blues, but with this one it sings.  We had an email from France last night which included the sentence, "They love the table thing by the way."  I'm glad they love the table thing - it was hard to give away! 

Sunday 17 March 2013

Happy (Belated) Mothering Sunday

New sewing machine, new things to learn - a bit of free machine embroidery for our Mothering Sunday cards, to go with the cushions I made (and forgot to photograph) for everyone.  Oops!

Edited to add: Oh dear, I didn't press 'publish'!  Sorry for delay!

Sunday 3 March 2013

Half term


A half-term finish - can you guess what it is?


Full points if you said it's a fabric envelope for a sweet boy's 'Lifestory Book' his Mum keeps so he'll always know about his birth family.  Sorry, you can't see the whole of the front because I need to keep his name off my blog.  The lizard is because - well he likes lizards,  Also, rugby and vehicles, hence the rugby ball hidden under the scissors and the vehicles on the flap.  On which I put two poppers, even though the flap was really a bit thick and the hammer was near my thumb and fingers and scary.


Next mystery item.


Letters for the reverse of the school banner.  When I've worked up the necessary nerve to get my humungous piece of plywood down and iron them all in place I'll be able to start sewing them all in place.  Hurrah, dozens of letters to sew round!  (Actually, that's not a problem, I quite like the precision of doing that - the difficulty is that the piece of fabric is so big to manoeuvre about, and you end up with unsewn letters trying to peel off because they're getting mauled in the manoeuvring.)  Anyway, the nerve almost came upon me yesterday, but was elbowed out of the way by the reality that Mothering Sunday is only a week away, and the gift situation hadn't been entirely - well - sewn up...more on that after next weekend!


I also started a non-quilty, non-businessy project during half-term with this little lot.



It's grown really quickly, I think because I'm using a bigger hook than recommended on the ball band, which feels like cheating somehow.  (Although I'm not sure who's watching me - the crochet police?)


Gotta love the stripy rows!