jenna brand

January 18, 2011 · 7:45 pm

Wall Art and Parent Love

Before I started sewing, I worked a lot with paper. I’ve always loved quilts, but I thought sewing would be too difficult. So I left the sewing for my mother, and I cut and pasted little quilts out of paper scraps. My mom had made a couple of paper quilts, giving me the idea. In these pictures you’ll see the three large scale ones I made that hang in my living room. I’ve also given a couple smaller ones away, but they weren’t as nice as these, I’m sorry to say.

In the pictures I’m also including a close-up look at a little fabric birdie my mom sewed for me and my dad framed. I love my creative parents!

My dad made this frame, too – now that I think about it!:

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January 17, 2011 · 9:26 pm

Be Mine, Valentine

I finished my other two Valentine’s Day pillows!

These guys are felt letters hand-appliqued to shot cotton pillow fronts. The shot-cotton is bordered in sparkly red strips because I didn’t have enough of the shot-cotton to fill the front. I’m nothing if not resourceful, dudes! The backs are the same faux-tweed envelope enclosures I used on these guys.

Obviously I was heavily inspired by this pillow I showcased earlier and found on etsy. I used a font called Abbeyline that I downloaded for free HERE.

Yay for finally introducing some color into my living room!

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January 17, 2011 · 9:06 pm

Bloggers Pillow Party: January

Here are three of my five Valentine’s Day Pillows:

I’m sorry these pictures look a little funky. You can zoom-in by clicking on the images. I’m trying to take better photos of my work, but it’s just not happening what with my incredibly dark den of a house, limited opportunities as I’m on toddler-time, and the general ineptitude of myself and my camera.

These pillows show a patchworked strip of red scraps attached to a faux-linen front and faux-tweed envelop enclosures for the pillow-backs. The faux-tweed was purchased 100 years ago at a store-closing blow-out sale. The faux-linen was an interesting adventure. I went to Jo-Ann’s intending to buy real linen, only to find it priced at approx. $12 a yard. Then I went over to the burlaps and found these homespun unbleached cottons hiding on the bottom shelf. They looked incredibly similar to the linens, only they cost $3.50 a yard! So that was an easy shopping decision, especially considering I want to make about 50 pillow covers for my house : ) My mom says the unbleached cotton will also be easier to care for than linen would have been, so there’s another little victory.

Although they are rather simple, I cannot help but go ahead and enter them in the Bloggers Pillow Party over at Stitched in Color. There are many wonderful pillows being showcased over there, my favorite being this one. Flickr Pool is over here. Check ’em out!

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January 15, 2011 · 12:42 am

Seeing Red

Hello there! My Valentine’s pillows are almost done (pictures upon completion). They are taking up more fabric than originally predicted but that’s because I want them lined and sturdy.

Perhaps it’s my work on these pillows, or maybe it’s the abundance of red in my fabric stash, or maybe it’s the new red curtains we hung in the sewing room/office that make it look like an opium den but I am living and breathing red red red. Maybe I can wax poetic and say it’s due to the fact that I am very pregnant and red is the color of life, fertility, and uteral goo.

So I’m going to make an all red art quilt for the Modern Quilt Guild’s Project Modern 2: Monochromatic Challenge. Wahoo! This will be my first artsy art quilt. There’s a 30% chance I’m going to hate it, but let’s be optimistic. I’ve cut out all the pieces for my top and am hoping to get a good go on it this weekend while hubby works on the upstairs bathroom remodeling project and son #1 is playing at Grandma’s. I can tell you that it will be called “Whirlwind Romance” (I think) and is utilizing the liberated quilt technique of inserting strips.

Also – Fat Quarterly’s new color theme is “Rich Reds”. Flickr group HERE. Red red red!

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January 9, 2011 · 7:46 pm

Valentine’s Day Pillows

My living room is a study in beige. My carpet is beige, the couches are beige, the curtains are beige, and the walls are beige. Also – our two main pieces of art are paper quilts made mostly out of neutrally neutral colors (more on those some other time). I am sort of afraid of colors, I’ll admit it. However, another piece of reasoning behind my ode-to-beige house was the hope that I would make fabulous quilts and pillow covers that would transform the house with every season/holiday. So far that’s been a bit of a bust.

But not this Valentine’s Day! I’m making pillow covers. Here are my pieces of inspiration:

Yellow Love Pillow by HoneyPieDesign. Available on Etsy for $38. Click image for link.

Love Amour Burlap Pillow by YellowBugBoutique. <br>Available on Etsy for $37. Click image for link.

Burlap Love Pillow Cover by Wrapitupllc. <br> Available for purchase on Etsy for $18. Click image for link.

I’m going to make two applique pillows inspired by the above, and then three pillows inspired by this beauty.

I joked with my husband that i should really be focusing on my Martin Luther King Day pillows. Was I really kidding? Hmm….

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January 9, 2011 · 7:43 pm

Christmas Stockings

Although Christmas has passed, I am still a little bit stuck in the season. There are a couple of holidays crafts I want to finish-up so that I can enjoy them next year. The most important thing to get done was to make a stocking for future baby boy, due March 31ish (or April Fool’s Day, perhaps?) 2011. Who knows how much time I’ll have for sewing when I have two little boys in need of mothering!

This one below is mine. With the boys’ stockings I did free-motion quilting (very broadly) in shiny ribbon threads, but for mine I did hand sewn detailing in gold thread around the stars and snow-flakes in the fabric pattern. Lots of french knots, which are fun. It was a little gift to myself to do this special detailing as, let’s be honest, I’m the only one who really cares about that sort of thing ; P

These stockings are not “perfect” – they have raw edges exposed on the inside from the two “quilt sandwiches” of front fabric, bating, and lining sewn together to assemble the sock. The hanging loop is a little wonky, too. However, they look pretty cute if I do say so myself. The letters are each of our initials cut out of felt and hand appliqued. I love hand-appliqueing felt (see my advent calendar’s numbers) because it doesn’t fray and looks nice and neat.

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January 8, 2011 · 7:37 pm

Sweater Sleeve Wine Bags

There’s nothing like gifting a nice bottle of wine! For this past Christmas I made a couple of wine-bottle gift bags from sweater sleeves. I’ve seen wine-bottle sweaters in a slew of catalogues, and it’s such an easy and cute craft project!

Here is a very simple pictorial tutorial. The only thing I would add is that sometimes I had to slim down my sweater sleeves, but that was mostly because I was using very large men’s cable-knit sweaters. Also – for the first bag I basted the felt circle base by hand-sewing, and then machine sewed it in place. This was mostly just because I’m not very used to sewing tight circles and there’s a lot of bulk. However, I didn’t feel the need to hand-baste again after making my first.

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January 3, 2011 · 7:01 pm

Storm at Sea Pillows

After the paper piecing disaster of 2010, I re-cooped and started from scratch on these pillows. I bought new fabrics and worked with my husband developing patterns so that I could avoid any paper piecing assembly. I am so happy to report that the pillows turned out REALLY nicely, if I do say so myself. I love them and was very proud to gift them to my mother for Christmas. They match her bedroom perfectly and I know she appreciates the gorgeous batik fabrics.

They are 20-inch pillows and there is a scant black border around the blocks on the front. They are slip-cover, removable pillow covers with free-motioned squiggly quilting.

I wish I could offer a tutorial on these, but hell if I know how it all ended up coming together and I can guarantee you there are probably dozens of ways to assemble these that would be easier than what I ended up doing. However, I can toss some links for other online tutorials for Storm and Sea blocks.

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December 26, 2010 · 9:09 pm

Grace’s Quilt – Part Two

I was able to finish this quilt for my mother-in-law. It was supposed to be a birthday present (in September) but due to first-trimester sluggish-sickness it got bumped till Christmas. Thank goodness I had used Amy’s One Thing, One Week Challenge to get organized.

So without further ado, here is the original post about this quilt (including its inspiration – a print by Marca-Relli), and here are some pictures of the final product:

And here’s the back:

For the quilting, I did straight-line detailing, using the same color of thread as the fabric for each designated area. I used invisible thread for the bobbin. I was really nervous about using invisible thread, but it worked out great! I didn’t even really have to adjust my tension.

I had another first by machine sewing the binding. I sewed the binding to the back of the quilt first, and then folded it over and machine top-stitched it down on the front. I used my invisible thread again for the bobbin, which I think is necessary if you’re going to use this technique. It definitely isn’t as neat as hand-stitching, but it is more secure, and it certainly is faster (which was required).

This quilt really wins the prize for not having any major screw-ups. The worst thing that happened was that I miscounted how many of the beige colored blocks I needed, and had to quick assemble three of them before completing the quilt-top. I was able to pull them together in an hour, and it only took that long because I had virtually ran-out of fabric and had to make tiny scraps work.

I am absolutely in love with the mosaic styling of this quilt. I may be the only one; reactions have been mixed. I’m definitely fantasizing about some monochromatic quilts in my future.

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December 26, 2010 · 8:34 pm

Fabric Directionality

Although my paper piecing project was a total bust, it did give me an opportunity to think about fabric directionality.

If you’re using a fabric pattern that has a noticeable direction, you’ve got to be careful how you cut your pieces. Well, you don’t HAVE to, but it can make a dramatic difference in the quality of your quilting project.

In my case, I was using this wonderful sailboat fabric from Aunt June’s Etsy store.

I had to be very careful when cutting out all of my pieces so that when the project was completed, all of the boats on my pillowcases would be facing the same way. I couldn’t have some boats sailing sideways or upside-down, as that would be bad for crew morale.

Read on for a more detailed discussion of fabric directionality.

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