Hive 6 September Block with Ashleigh

What is your name?

My name is Ashleigh and I blog at ickletomato.blogspot.co.uk

This is me on holiday waiting for dinner. Yum.

Where do you live?

I live the other side of the pond from most of you in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Tell us about your family (Spouse, kids, grandkids, pets, etc.)

 I have been married to David for 9 years now. He is really sweet about my hobby turned obsession as it slowly takes over our whole house. He offers constructive criticism which is great when you just need that second opinion to back up what you were going to do anyway! I tell him what I’m working on and he tells me the latest football scores and we both pretend we’re interested!

Tell us about how you got interested in quilting.

I have always enjoyed sewing. My grandmother was an amazing self taught sewer who made most of my mum’s clothes. She taught me to sew and we made dresses together when I was a teenager. It wasn’t until I moved house and had a bit more room I decided to get a sewing machine of my own. For the quilting – I blame my mother –in-law. She had been doing it for a while but decided to call it a day and gave me all her tools. We made a cushion together one Easter and that was it. I realised quilting was so much easier than making clothes – it’s just sewing straight lines, right?

How do you organize your fabric stash? (Picture appreciated)

I am fortunate to have my own sewing room with a large window for super light. My stash moves about all the time as it has grown from zero to overwhelming pretty quickly. For the minute, it is stored in these plastic tubs on the shelf so I can see it all.

This cupboard is full of boxes for large multi colour scraps, small multi colour scraps and strips.

These are the trays for all my colour scraps.

Who is/are your favorite fabric designers?

I don’t really have a favourite and never really buy material all from one line. Lotta Jansdotter (what a great name btw!) always catches my eye and I just recently helped myself to a quite a few fabrics from the Lewis and Irene collection.

What is one thing you have learned that you wish you knew when you first started quilting?

It involves a lot of ironing which is no fun at all.

What is your favorite sewing/quilting tool and why should we all go out and buy it?

Silk pins – they go through every fabric so smoothly and hardly leave a mark.

Who is your favorite fictional character and why? (Could be from a book, movie, TV show, etc.)

I love reading but don't really have a favourite fictional character. 

Now on to the style of the block.

I have pulled together a palette of colours that I would like you to stick to if at all possible. It is hard to describe so I have pulled some fabrics together and some screenshots from design seeds to give you a feel of the tone.



It’s not so much the colours but the shades. So not primary red blue and yellow, but tomato orangey red, denim blue and mustard. Teal not turquoise. Rich jewel tones. Do you know what I mean? So you don’t have to stick to only these colours, you could add green for instance but try and stick to mood. 

To give you examples of what I have used may help: so I used Kona Cerise, Bella Solids Stone, Bella Solids Grey and prints from Moda Just Wing It collection. And this picture picks out just the solids colours. Bad photo I know but probably best at reflecting the true colours.

 

So on to my quilt block. I have chosen to make a modern framed sampler quilt. Let me explain. I thought it would be nice for you to pick your favourite quilt block, make a monochrome mini version say no more than 5” square, 6” at most and then frame it in ½” neutral colour and then place it off centre in the colours of the patchwork block.

Pictures probably explain it better. This was my inspiration at wombat quilts. But instead of cute pictures I thought of cute quilt blocks. Also this picture helped with the print fabric matching the solid. Finally this picture which I had forgotten about but obviously helped the design along.

So first pick a patchwork block that would look good in miniature – so you could do a nine patch, half square triangles, a cross or hash, churn dash, improv, mod mosaic, paper pieced – anything at all. If you google or search in flickr for pincushions it will give you good inspiration as to what blocks look good in mini.

Do it all in one colour against white. I used one fabric but you could use more just in one colour.

Then do a little border which makes it like a photo frame. So just using a 1” strip in a neutral grey or stone colour. I did it courthouse step style.

Finally add that colour pop border to the outside making a block of any size. But I would like a fair chunk of colour around the outside to emphasise the mini ness of the of the patchwork. I will piece all together in a puzzle like style.

I hope I haven’t left it to open to choice so that you don’t know what to do! Let me know if there are any questions.