Feathers, place mats, AAI quilt and harem pants

Another week with cool weather in the Netherlands. School holidays but no summer yet. I But warmer weather is promised next week! I hope so.
But cool weather means more time behind my sewing machine to practice free motion quilting. I finished three quilts this week. A mini quilt for the Alzheimer Art Guilt Initiative, which is on his way to the United States.

Unwareness

An 8x12 inch mini quilt for the Alzheimer Art Guilt Initiative.
Top and back: Egyptian cotton, Thread: Gütermann Rayon multi color.
When I am machine quilting for vife minutes, I am unaware of the world around me. When I see Alzheimer patients afraid of the world around them, I wish they were unaware of the world around them.
I hope someone will want to pay for the quilt.

I had to practice the technique of thread painting ribbons for the SewCalGal fmq challenge 2013#1. Finally a ribbon I like and I have another postcard to give away.
I found a excellent tutorial with pattern of Libby Liebermann. In the tutorial Libby sews a quilt with a big ribbon. She uses a zigzag to fill the colors of the ribbon and she is wright. Of course.

I made place mats for one of my daughter in law. We celebrated the birthday of my husband in her garden, so our two grand daughters could play. We do not like to go to a restaurant with kids of 2 and 3.  They have a table cloth of Indonesian batik in red colors. So I hope she likes the place mats.
I still had to choose the binding and to finish another pair. Batik or red?

Another finish this week: the harem pants of colorful batik for grand daughter Sascha. We took her to the goat farm and of course she want to wear it! And the pants for her foll had to be ...... pink.

My WIP's for next week:
1. I still have those big pieces of purple Egyptian cotton. Two 100 inch square and two 35 inch square. I started to quilt a whole cloth of the smaller pieces. Almost 30% of the quilting is finished. Quilting, micro quilting and hyper quilting with different colours of thread and metal thread. I will finish it this weekend. Fun! It will be the first quilt wall hanging in my house.

2. I already pieced the top of two ladders and snakes play quilts for my granddaughters. I want to applique the snakes, ladders and numbers. Also two big dices. The play quilts must be ready before their birthdays in Augustus and September.

3. Two more red place mats for my daughter in law. So I can give it to her the next time we go to see them.

4.The fabrics for two more Balloon baby quilts are cut weeks ago. This week one finish. The one I will give to my youngest daughter when she finally can tell me she is pregnant. 

Wandering through the beautiful Waterland of Amsterdam

Today we made a long walk.
We live in the North of Amsterdam. 10 minutes by bus to the centre of Amsterdam, but a twenty minutes walk to 'Waterland' the beautiful, quiet region north east of Amsterdam. It is surrounded by a lake: IJsselmeer. The Waterland is ideal for cycling and wandering.

In this post are links. Some links link to Wikipedia, these articles have a English version too.

Five minutes walking from our apartment we pass  ''t Sluisje' (The Lock), a cafe. A nice place to stay and have a drink or a meal. When the sun is shining there are a lot of tourists enjoying the view.

We walk out of Amsterdam over the Nieuwerdammerdijk en Schellingwouderdijk, one of the many dikes in The Waterland.

 After 45 minutes walking over the dike, we reach the first village: Durgerdam 

When you wandered through Waterland, you understand the name of this area.

We walked to another small village: Ransdorp, you can see the tower. Long time ago they had no money to finish the top.

Big church and town hall for a village with 200 inhabitants!

Not too bad, living in Ransdorp.

 

 These wooden walls are typical for old houses in the region, the Zaanstreek' North of Amsterdam. They are named 'Zaanse houses' after another big city in this region: Zaandam. They are part of our national heritage

 After three hours almost back in Amsterdam we walked next to a lot of community gardens. In a lot of gardens just a lot of beautiful flowers nowedays. Most people live whole summer in the little, luxury house in their garden.

 

Back at our balcony we enjoyed our view on a pond with a glass of good wine.
Life is not too bad.

Cheers!

Thanks everybody for your kind words!

It is so nice of you for stopping by, I love to hear from everyone of you, so please feel free to leave a comment.

If you have a question I will try and respond via e-mail. Please make sure your blogger profile is linked to your e-mail, otherwise I wont be able to e-mail you back.

If you need to reach me feel free to e-mail me at marelizeries[at]gmail[dot]com

Thanks so much for reading

Keep quilting!

Maartje Quilt
Amsterdam

Practice, practice .......

I am looking forward to the beautiful things everybody made this week.
This week I decided to practice a lot. I started a few months ago to practice with Leah's Day  free motion quilting project and Leah's Guilt Along. I learned a lot and quilted my first quilts. I am now addicted to free motion quilting, I want to make beautiful quilted whole clothes and trapunto quilts, but need a lot of free motion practice before I start.  I quilt Leah's new patterns for practice, but I do not want to quilt along with Express Your Love or other quilts. So I was glad I found the SewCalGal 2013 free motion challenge. I started with the five challenges and finished them. But on the SewCalGal website is more to learn: there are more challenges: the challenges of SewCalGal 2012 free motion challenge.
All challenges have a tutorial of an expert quilters and all the experts invite you to try new patterns and techniques. There is even a tutorial form Leah! The assignments are so fun to do. So I decided this week to free motion quilt a lot and do as many as tutorials as possible.

I bought a lot of dark and light purple cotton. (6 yard,width 97 inch) Cotton with a shine! I sandwiched a 28 inch square sandwich for a tiles design (Tutorial Angela Waters). In every tile another assignment. Just like Leah, I like to wake up early, so I can quilt before my husband awake. So I practice every day. I finished the tile sampler Thursday afternoon, just before dinner.

I used a too thick polyester batting for the 'trapunto effect' but the quilt was stiff and sometimes difficult to handle. Had to find another batting.

I will cut the quilt in pieces for postcards and place mats.

 I love micro quilting. Stitching so slow that you can almost count the stitches, so I like the July and October challenges:

October challenge, tutorial Teri Lucas (8 inch square)

July challenge: Cindy Needham  (8x11 inch) It is a bit Zentangle quilting!

A fun challenge is the August Bonus tutorial by Susan Brubaker Knapp: take a picture and quilt the Pattern. I used this picture

And this is a first try in the last tile of the quilt.

Next time I will use more colors!
I will use more pictures to quilt postcards and mini quilts. So fun!


The April tutorial of Don Linn: transferring a pattern with tulle. I used this method  for the September challenge of Paula Reid.
The transfer of the pattern with the tulle, was not a success. The chalk lines  disappear, so I need to finished with drawing three corners without pattern. I used too thick polyester batting, so it was not possible to lay the tulle on the sandwich beck again. The lines did not fit anymore.
I was out of tulle, so I used this fabric which I found in my stash.

                                                                                                                                                                    

I printed Donś pattern and pinned the paper on Sandwich and sewed on the lines. As you can see it is difficult to remove all the paper.

Some challenges were just new patterns:

November challenge: Sarah Vedeler: Swirls

Januari challenge: Frances Moore

Januari challenge: Frances Moore

May Challenge: Leah Day:

August challenge: tutorial  Wendy Sheppard. Nice tutorial with a easy to quilt and beautiful filler:jester hat.

                      

 The March Challenge of Anne Vahl: more fillers:

It is so nice of you for stopping by, I love to hear from everyone of you, so please feel free to leave a comment. Unfortunately I decided to exclude 'anonymous' comments, my blog gets attacked by so many spam and bots that I've decided to change that setting.

If you have a question I will try and respond via e-mail. Please make sure your blogger profile is linked to your e-mail, otherwise I wont be able to e-mail you back.

If you need to reach me feel free to e-mail me at maartjequilt@gmail.com

Thanks so much for reading
Maartje Quilt
Amsterdam

Free motion quilting friday finishes

To practice free motion quilting I finished a lot of postcards and ribbons for the 2013 SewCalGal free motion challenges #1 (ribbons) and #4 (postcards).  The micro quilting on the cards is a good practice to control the speed of the machine and I can practice different designs.

I finally found a shop with Isacord thread not far away from Amsterdam, and I bought a box with summer colors. The pink square postcard is my first finish with my Isacord thread. The other postcards are free motion quilted with Madeira multi color rayon.

I have to practice a lot more on the ribbons. I do not like my ribbons. I made them free hand. Next time I will draw the lines, before I fill in the colors.
First thing I had to do before Sunday is two place mats or a table runner for a daughter in law. We celebrate my husbands birthday at her place. She has a nice garden where the kids can play. 

Bad choice of the pink color, but it's looks worse on this IPhone picture.

 

This card I used for the Postcard Swap The theme is 'Wedding'

 Cards without ribbons:

I like to try McTavish

It is so nice of you for stopping by, I love to hear from everyone of you, so please feel free to leave a comment. Unfortunately I decided to exclude 'anonymous' comments, my blog gets attacked by so many spam and bots that I've decided to change that setting.

If you have a question I will try and respond via e-mail. Please make sure your blogger profile is linked to your e-mail, otherwise I wont be able to e-mail you back.

If you need to reach me feel free to e-mail me at maartjequilt@gmail.com

Thanks so much for reading

Keep quilting!

Maartje Quilt
Amsterdam

Isacord polyester thread! Such a beautiful colors!

In Amsterdam I cannot find Isacord thread for fmq. In a Quiltshop with plenty of other thread, they laughed arrogant and told me never to use polyester for machine quilting. But I wanted to try the thread which Leah recommend and uses for her beautiful quilts.
Today I went to my eldest daughter in Hilversum. Always nice to be with my daughter, Roos, and beautiful granddaughter, Salijn. I just find out that in Barneveld, 40 km away from Hilversum, is a shop where I can buy Isacord polyester thread for embroidery and free motion quilting!
It was raining a bit, I had the fast car of my son in law (other daughters husband) and my daughter was very eager to drive in that car. So it was not difficult to persuade my daughter to drive to Barneveld. It is a 25 minutes drive on the high way. My daughter was a bit down, but after five minutes in that fast car she was happy again and my granddaughter slept peacefully with pink cheeks in her chair in the back of the car. All three of us happy and on our way to Isacord!

All those beautiful summer colors in a box.

The shop had a wall with all isacord poly thread. I felt in the 'Land of milk and honey'. Such a beautiful colors and so much colors! I treat myself and bought a box with thirty! summer colors. I will awake very early tomorrow morning and do some thread play with my Isacord!

By the way: Baarneveld is the centre of the Dutch Poultry farming. Nice to find Isacord there! Colored eggs!

A wall with Isacord colors

The shop: Huissteden Barneveld

It is so nice of you for stopping by, I love to hear from everyone of you, so please feel free to leave a comment. Unfortunately I decided to exclude 'anonymous' comments, my blog gets attacked by so many spam and bots that I've decided to change that setting.

If you have a question I will try and respond via e-mail. Please make sure your blogger profile is linked to your e-mail, otherwise I wont be able to e-mail you back.

If you need to reach me feel free to e-mail me at maartjequilt@gmail.com

Thanks so much for reading

Keep quilting!

Maartje Quilt
Amsterdam