Super Strips quilt top at Gresford

Don't these just glow?


Five more lovely versions of Super Strips were started today at Gresford, two using Jelly Rolls (21/2in wide strips), two with 1 1/2in wide strips (like my original version) and another using 1 1/4in strips, inspired by the narrow strip version Dot made at the December 2008 workshop. As usual with this workshop, they all worked out beautifully but produced very different finished effects. The two above (ultra narrow strips at top and 1 1/2in strips at the bottom) show how effective a symmetrical layout looks, with the strips grading through carefully selected fabrics, with strong contrasts overall. The blue and red version (top) includes blue prints with touches of red and red with touches of blue, linking the two strip selections, while the patchwork has a similar effect with red and yellow fabrics, but with even more contrast.

The quilt centre on the left below uses fabrics from the same jelly roll selection - including a very busy, bandana-like print used for the borders (in red and black) and the rich spring florals in a more realistic style, bursting with colour. Just the thing to welcome spring flowers! The very busy red & white/black & white prints calm the multicoloured florals, rather than appearing busy themselves. The pink and green patchwork on the right takes it's cue from the pink and green border fabric (which will reappear in multiple borders), subtly shading from deeper colours in the centre of the piece, showing how the ombre effect used on the first two panels works with more delicate colour choices.

The last photo shows the design made with a marbled batik jelly roll, which includes all the colours of the rainbow, with tertiary browns. The cooler colours have been kept for the outer triangles, while the brown borders give it the feeling of a flowerbed. Placing the warm colours mainly at the centre of a rainbow Super Strips quilt will draw the eye to the centre. I must make a rainbow version soon! Click this link and scroll down to see a very different rainbow Super Strips made last month in Jersey - I think from the same roll.

I'm looking forward to seeing all these quilts (or at least the tops) finished!

My next workshop at Gresford will be Spinning Squares on Sunday 2nd August 2009 - click here for info. My workshop sample is on the table in the photo below.

Super Strips from Today's Quilter pattern

Sue Jennings, one of the UK Quilters United group on Facebook, sent me this photo of her narrow strip version of Super Strips today.  She contacted me a few days ago, asking if it would work to make Super Strips from half the jelly roll strip.  This is how Dot Sherlock made her Super Strips at the second workshop I taught at Gresford, so I knew it would work.

One thing you might want to alter if you try this - use an uneven number of strips in the first squares rather than an even number. That way you won't end up with miniscule triangles in the centre when you cut the two initial strip pieced squares. In fact, I think that's what Dot did in her version. I think if you used 27 halved jelly roll strips it would be a good number. The completed squares would measure 20 3/4in approx. inc. the seam allowances. Expect the squares to end up slightly smaller than you think they will be - with all those seams, you're bound to loose a bit across the patchwork. You will have to adjust every measurement as you go, to fit your patchwork of course.

Sue sent me the photo at the top today and wrote - 

I have finished the top - not a great photo as it is blowing a gale! I really enjoyed the process and many thanks for including all the measurements in the pattern, as it made it so much easier to make the adjustments for the three quarter inch finished strips. I had to add a little extra fabric from my stash and I made the outer pieced border only 4 inches finished wide, to fit the size of my wall space. I just need to get it quilted now, before Spring comes and goes. I will really have to fight the urge to create another in reproduction fabrics. These colours are SO out of my comfort zone, but I wanted Spring colours. 

Doesn't it look cheerful and colourful?  Of course, there is a lot more sewing, but it is worth it.

Super Strips x 2

Two very different versions of my Super Strips quilt appeared on my Facebook news feed earlier today, within a few minutes of each other.  Carol Fieldhouse started hers in one of my workshops a few years ago - I'll have to dig through my workshop photos and see if I can spot which one!  It shouldn't be too difficult (I hope) as Carol has done the centre of her quilt with narrower strips, and there haven't been as many of those as the 21/2in strip centre versions. The batik fabrics make it look like a watercolour. She writes -

Howzat! A Susan Briscoe workshop, **#!!! years ago, finally quilted and bound.... it's almost all batik strips and I'm keeping it!

Margaret Cull posted a photo of her Super Strips on the UK Quilters United Facebook page a few minutes before.  This one uses all the same strip width and I'm guessing it was made from my pattern which appeared in Today's Quilter last year.  There is a small but subtle difference between the pattern and the workshop version, because the pattern has an uneven number of strips in the initial piecing, which results in a tiny quarter square triangle effect in the middle, whereas the workshop version has an even number, so there's no mini QST in the centre.  Margaret says -

Took me almost a year to get round to quilting it but I am very pleased with it. Going to be a gift for a friend.

The rich gold and blue colourscheme and the scrolling quilting designs give Margaret's quilt a rather heraldic look.

Thanks very much for permission to show your work here.

Super Strips can be made in so many different fabrics and shading variations, which I think is the mark of a versatile quilt pattern.

Great Northern Quilt Show at Harrogate

I had six quilts hanging at the Great Northern Quilt Show last weekend - my Kona Bay Challenge winner "Butterfly Dance", "Fish and Chips" (made for the Batik Beauties "Delights of the Sea" challenge), "Super Strips no. 2", "Jelly Roll Crumbs", "The Denman Kannon" and "Lulea Blockhus". I was also demonstrating and trading, so the weekend was quite busy all round. Luckily I didn't have to fit all the quilts in the car to bring home - "Butterfly Dance" and "Fish and Chips" continue to tour at the Autumn quilt shows on the Grosvenor Exhibitions programme, and "Lulea Blockhus" (below) went home with my mum & dad (it was a birthday present to mum several years ago).

"Fish and Chips" made quite a few visitors smile and I had several conversations about the merits of Lowcock's dandelion & burdock vs their lemonade! To anyone who lived on Teesside in the 1960s & 1970s, the brand name is immediately recalled. I was amused to find real wooden chip forks on the counter of the fish & chip shop opposite the Dun Cow pub in Sedgefield on Saturday night and saved one (unused) for another quilt embellishment in future. My dad made the chip fork on the quilt from a Magnum ice lolly stick!


"The Denman Kannon" won a Judges Merit award in the Art Quilt section. Before I enter it into another show, I need to add some more quilting to the centre and make sure it hangs better. The binding looks a bit too tight along the sides, although the measurement is correct, so I think the problem is the dense quilting in the border and the minimal quilting in the centre. There is a wide area across the bottom of the main panel with almost no quilting, so perhaps some blue on blue sashiko would help there. The hitomezashi stitching in the border isn't as dense in the lower half of the quilt, to try to compensate for the lack of handquilting in that area, but it obviously hasn't quite worked. I will add more "invisible" hand quilting to the centre to even it out.


Now that "Super Strips No. 2" is bound and quilted, it is going to be much easier to take around as a workshop sample. The original Super Strips, with 1in wide finished strips, still awaits its outer border. I think I will probably machine quilt it - twice as many quilt in the ditch seams as no. 2 don't really appeal. I still need to quilt the border on No. 2, as I ran out of time to stitch along all the short "piano key" strips. I wonder if anyone noticed?


There wasn't much time to bind both "Super Strips No. 2" and "Jelly Roll Crumbs" (bottom centre in photo below), as I had ordered the fabric for the binding from the USA, so I could use one of the fabrics included in the strip cut pack - a printed stripe with a polka dot motif. I had hoped to get a chance to find it at Festival of Quilts but realised there probably wouldn't be enough time, which was right as it turned out, so I ordered it online as a backup. It took nearly a month to arrive, because it got stuck at UK Customs! I don't mind paying the customs charge which is fair enough but I wasn't pleased about the rather excessive delay (Global Priority Envelopes from the USA usually arrive in about 7 days). Running out of time, I decided to sew the binding to the smaller quilt without measuring the binding to match the size of the quilt - it worked fine, and the quilt looks just as flat as the larger one. I used an 80/20 wadding which was quite flat. I wouldn't sew a binding to a polyester wadding quilt without measuring, as I know it would probably end up wavy.

As this is our biggest northern show, there were a lot of entries by people I know on the local quilt scene too. Overall, it felt like the standard was higher this year, but there was still a lot of variety and quite a few first quilt show entries.

I was judging some of the sections on Wednesday (the organisers keep you well away from your own stuff and your friends'!) and one of the nice things about being a quilt judge is being able to award a "Judge's Choice". This is the one award where you can simply choose your favourite quilt from the show, as all the other prizes are awarded on a points system, with several judges' results added together. I can be from any section, not only the ones you are judging.

This entry in the Small Wallhanging section, "Dunstanburgh Castle" by Wendy Deverill, was my Judge's Choice. She wrote, "This is my favourite place, on the Northumberland Coast. I used commercial fabrics for the background, and dyed the sea and sky fabrics for the front panel. I machine quilted the green fabric with shirring elastic in the bobbin, which was great fun." If you left click on the photo, you should be able to read my comments.

I visited Dunstanburgh Castle, accessed along a footpath from Craster village, many times when we holidayed in Northumberland when I was a child. It is in a very isolated and exposed spot. I often wondered what it would have been like to live there.

My friend Debbie Gordon entered a smaller version of my "Masu" quilt in Small Wallhangings, with a different quilting design and using a selection of my wools and silks (the original quilt is behind me in the photo at the top). The gorgeous autumn colours were much admired.



Here we are at Gresford Memorial Hall's fete on Monday last week, both sewing bindings as fast as possible!

New Routes - Super Strips

The rain stopped and the tarmac dried out enough to quickly get a couple of photos of the 'Celtic Mystery' Super Strips with the last border added. The quilt is now 69in square, so a decent size for a small bed quilt. Part of the mystery about why the 50 strip roll didn't go quite as far as I thought it would and the centre is basically the same size as the 40 strip version was solved when I remembered I'd removed two strips from the roll before I started - both hot fuchsia pink metallics, which didn't really work for what I planned, as I wanted the overall effect to be more like some of the garnet-inlaid goldwork of the Sutton Hoo treasure - reds, blues, golds. A quilt fit for an early medieval king perhaps.

With all the rotational symmetry that goes on within the Super Strips design, these quilts don't usually have an obvious right way up, but perhaps the mid brown section of the penultimate border should go at the bottom? i.e. Fluff is lounging around at the top, helping to keep the patchwork from blowing away! She is taking her quilt care duties very seriously at the moment.


Quilting ideas - as the original inspiration for this patchwork is a coverlet at the Quilt Museum, York, so there's no quilting or wadding (batting) involved in it, I prefer my Super Strips not to have too much obvious quilting detracting from the pieced design. So I will machine quilt this, in the ditch along each seam, and also use a wavy line to quilt down the centre of each strip, in a varigated thread, perhaps yellow thru to red. The vintage 1973 Bernina Minimatic has the 3-step ultility zigzag which can be lengthened into a lovely wave, so I think I will use that. Although the same stitch is on the Bernina 153 QE, the Minimatic seems to stitch it more neatly - and it purrs!

Super Strips workshop at Gresford - AGAIN!

Well, TV Licencing people, because I don't watch TV, I can get two quilt tops made in a short time - LOL! (please read previous post if that has you completely baffled!)

I have made two more samples for my Super Strips quilt top workshop, as I'm teaching it again at Gresford on Sunday November 22nd - photos to follow soon. Just run "super strips" through the search box (top right menu) to see photos taken at previous workshops.

This time I used a Moda Jelly Roll, Basic Grey's "Figgy Pudding" retro Christmas (first photo above), and a Hoffman Bali Pop, colourway Kiwiberry (second photo) - the original strip packs are shown below. The Bali version needs the outer border adding to finish, where I am going to shade from the brightest green through to the dark purple and back again.

Super Strips is one of those designs that seems to work with any fabric combination/style you like. I experiemented with an eight, rather than nine, strip set for the quilt centre and it works out really well. There's enough fabric in a 40 strip roll to allow a little leeway and using strips from the roll for the border frames in the design too. The finished size will be slightly smaller - about 52in square unless I add another border (extra fabric) to the outer edge - but this makes a perfect size for a sofa throw or big lap quilt. The Christmas version looks like it is going to be finished with a very thin cotton wadding as a Christmas table cloth.

The workshop runs from 10 a.m. to 4p.m. and places cost £25 per person. We will be in the Green Room at Gresford Memorial Hall, near Wrexham, there is ample free parking and tea/coffee throughout the day is included in the workshop fee.

Super Strips quilt pattern in Today's Quilter

Super Strips, my jelly roll quilt loosely based on the Hearts and Crosses Coverlet, is in Today's Quilter issue 6, which will be in the shops shortly (the subscription copies should have arrived by now).  I've taught a slightly different version of this design as a workshop since about 2009, having made the original 11/2in strip version in 2008.  The one in the magazine has an uneven number of strips in the centre square, which makes the design slightly different to the workshop one, which has an even number, removing the tiny 'diamond' feature in the centre, which can be a bit tricky to line up if your jelly roll isn't accurately cut.

The fabric range I used for this, 'Katy Jump Rope' by Denise Schmidt for Free Spirit, has been reprinted, with some extra prints in the range, so you can get almost the same fabrics once again.   But, if you have a look at some of the workshop versions of Super Strips that have been made over the years, you will see that this is a pattern that works in just about any fabrics you like.

Have fun with the pattern - and I would love to see any more Super Strips quilts that are made from the magazine instructions.

North Somerset Quilters' Super Strips workshop

Today's workshop was Super Strips with North Somerset Quilters at Nailsea near Bristol.  Here's some of the patchwork they started.  We had a somewhat unexpected power cut at lunchtime, which meant we didn't get quite as far as usual, but everyone is well on their way - we could at least get some of the corner triangle strips cut out and ready :-) while we waited for the power to come back on.

There seemed to be several themes to the fabrics this time - really bold batiks -

 

Blocks of colour with lovely shading effects -

 

 

'Shabby chic' Moda Jelly Rolls were popular -

 

There were two Christmas fabric versions, the first one witha 2 1/2in strip roll and the one below that with 1 1/2in strips.  The first has quite a lot of metallic gold prints that aren't Christmas themed mixed in, but it works very well together - a good way to eke out Christmas fabrics in a project too, if you were cutting your own pieces from yardage.

 

This scrap strip version also uses 1 1/2in strips.  A big assortment of scraps definitely works best with the narrower strip width, like my original version of Super Strips.

 

This very stylish black, white & red combination is going to look great finished - very modern and fresh.

  

The workshop was combined with 'My Japanese Quilt Inspirations' talk last night.  Thanks for a fun day, and I look foward to seeing photos of the finished patchworks - and showing them off here of course!

Super Strips workshop - another before Christmas?

I had a few people asking about the Super Strips workshop when I was at Wrexham Quilting Circle last Wednesday. I have run it three times already at Gresford, but if there is enough interest, I will run it again before Christmas. Possible dates at the moment are November 22nd or 29th, or December 6th. All Sundays. It would depend on availablility of the room, but getting it for a day other than Sunday isn't easy - high demand.

Here's my Super Strips No.2 at Harrogate last weekend -


I have plans for a few more workshop samples! Seeing the fantastic selections of fabrics brought to my workshops (and of course, the lovely Moda Jelly Rolls, Bali Pops and other strip packs) makes me want to try out some other combinations as workshop quilts. Here's the "to do" list -first, Moda's "Figgy Pudding". I don't often buy Christmas fabrics, but these modern ones are such fun. This will probably be No. 3, if there is any chance of using it at Christmas!

Bali Pop - "Kiwiberry" - there have been a number of batik super strips pieced in the workshops, and the luminous quality of the batiks really produces a wonderful patchwork, glowing with colour.
And there is also the fab and funky "Wonderland" by Momo for Moda -


Simply by changing the fabrics, a wide variety of styles is achieved. I think it is a sign of an effective quilt design when it works with many varied fabric selections.

You can see some of the fabrics used at workshops in Jersey and Gresford (first and second workshops) by clicking the links.

If anyone is interested in attending, please contact me via my website link at the top right.

Village Quilters and Super Strips - update

I did the 'Super Strips' workshop with Village Quilters in April 2011 and as I was driving through Middlesbrough on my way to set up my demo display at Sew Caring Quilters exhibition last Friday, I arranged to drop in and see some of the finished tops and quilts. What an impressive collection! Use the link above to go back to photos of the workshop, where you can see these in the early stages.

This colourful version used a Fabric Freedom strip roll, with lots of metallics - it is very sparkly in real life.


Two Bali Pop 'Cappucino' strip sets made this quilt and matching cushion. This batik set makes a very sophisticated quilt. The diagonal strips and triangle borders at the ends are unique to this quilter's Super Strips and a great way to extend the design.


Moda 'Luna Notte' Jelly Roll -


Also by Moda, French General's 'Maison de Garance' -


A Jelly Roll designed by Sweetwater for Moda (not sure of the collection name) -


This quilt was made from strips cut by the quilter from her stash - carefully chosen for a glowing effect. It feels so cosy!


And a bag made from the scraps, plus a bit extra -


Village Quilters are an industrious group and meet for a full day on the Friday, so they can really get into their projects in the spacious hall. Several Christmas items were well underway. I liked this bunting - must make some for myself sometime.


It was lovely to see so many quilts finished since the workshop and I'm looking forward to working with this group again.