"Crème Berry" (no.15)

 I am not doing any favours for my 13th quilt. I have since completed another quilt in its place. Yes this is my 15th quilt. I had recently gone to a fabric store about 40 minutes from my house on the way to Melbourne and I bought this layer cake along with another. "Ville Fleurie" by French General for Moda. I was inspired by the colours when I returned home and began designing for it. I have always liked the idea of having the colour and pattern in one corner of the design and keep the rest in a white or cream fabric. So I made this chevron pattern using the moda collection and a cream and white fabric in-between to create that theme.

I created the squares and that was a fairly relaxing process. Seeing as the design was to split the squares in half diagonally it was simple to sew two seams and them cut between the
sewing lines.
One tool I have found amazing is the "Frixtion" pens by Pilot. I found this out somewhere, for the life of me I cannot remember (Either Youtube or Pinterest) but I used this to mark the middle of my fabric for when I would cut it later. The awesomeness of this is that when you iron the seams flat the heat will erase the pen mark! The picture above shows the mark with and without heat. When I did this I was astounded! I have never liked using chalk on my fabrics because I just couldn't get the mark completely off. This is a saviour for me, to the point I have to buy specific ones just for fabric as I regularly use them for writing.
I then laid out the pattern on the ground and with the colours I decided to make it a gradient design with the grey colours at the top, then red in the middle and purple at the bottom. I really liked the look of it and with the white fabric as a base the colours stood out.
Thor did an excellent job once again to match seams with the added insurance of pins. This quilt was a very relaxing process. It is a smaller quilt than no.14 "White Diamonds" (Check out previous posts) so it's mainly a lap quilt for cold winter nights.

I used Craft Smart spray adhesive to assemble the quilt and I'll need to purchase another as this one seems to be running out. I don't know that it is the best type of adhesive spray as it seems to leave drops of glue while being sprayed. Might be the way I tilt the can. It still did the job and the droplet marks have disappeared so it's not all that bad. 

Quilting was a little more time consuming. Though it is a small quilt I wanted to keep the same chevron pattern on the back as is shown on the front. I didn't attach any borders to this quilt as I didn't want to destroy the illusion of the design. So even though there was no border to quilt the pattern required a lot of stop and start. 
I quilted along the horizontal lines firstly, beginning in the middle and working my way out. I then rolled the quilt diagonally and quilted the diagonal chevron pattern, again starting in the middle and working out. I did quilt in the ditch where the patchwork was and then continued the quilting over the plain white squares in the top left corner. I had no problem with puckering - and as you are probably sick of me talking about my machine I'll restrain myself, but I still cannot get over how much better my quilts are using Thor. 
For binding I used some fabric from much stash, cut, joined and ironed to make it into a binding strip. The fabric is a cream colour similar to the cream in the backing and parts of the feature fabrics with a red almost paisley shape design over top. The red looks a little like coloured pencil strokes creating the same shape as paisley but without the inside decor between the lines. I've had this fabric for years and have used it for a lot of small things like broaches and hair clips. I hope to use the remainder of it in a quilt or something else but I really liked how this joined the backing fabric I picked with the front of the quilt. 
Hand sewing was pretty quick - only a few hours as opposed to several. I was watching "The Community" Season 3 while sewing the binding on. Music while making the quilt - Richard Marx Greatest Hits, FTIsland's "Treasure Box", The Corrs, Michael Jackson's Collection, Mika - there were a few others but I can't remember. I do tend to listen to the same stuff because my collection is not very big, but I'm glad I don't get sick of the same music all the time.

The last couple of photos are the final product, one has my feet in it. In that one you can really see the quilt design. I love the chevron pattern simply because the shapes just fit together so well. It's the same with hexagons and triangles, complicated shapes that look like they wouldn't fit but just do. 

This quilt I felt was just relaxing. It felt a little like I had come back to a place of joy in my work. Nothing went wrong in this project. Nothing really annoyed me. I didn't need to redo any part of it which was so wonderful. This was just a small, inspired and joyful project for me and I think it'll be hard to let this one go, but I do hope it will be sold. It is called "Crème Berry" - naming rights go to my mum, she's very good with names. I think it suits it very well.

Let me know you're thoughts. Come visit me on Instagram for ongoing updates on my quilting. (Link Below) I post about a lot of other things too, so everyone is welcome. 
Sew Happy.

Miss Mae.

https://www.instagram.com/miss.mae90/