Anna Maria Horner Liberty Fabric Feather No #4



Liberty Fabrics - Anna Maria Horner Feather

These Anna MariaHorner feathers are so addictive.  I thought I would make a little mug rug feather from some Liberty Tana Lawn scraps. The reality is I don't have Liberty Tana Lawn scraps and who does at £22.50 / metre?  The fabrics are so lovely that instead of cutting a set of them up, I thought I would showcase just one, and for this project I used Poppy and Daisy from the Liberty Art Fabrics collection.  The background is a French General solid.



Machine Quilting - Angela Walters Diamond Pattern

Also, I felt like I would be wimping out by just meandering the background again, so decided to try something new.  I am not short of books of machine quilting and this time I reached for Angela Walter's 'Shape by Shape' Free-Motion Quilting book.  I found a great diamond pattern - great because it is made up of straight lines, so I could stitch it without having to lower the feed dogs.  I also liked it as it has an art deco style which fits nicely with the historical Liberty print. I had to mark the fabric with a water erasable pen, but it was worth it to get the lovely all over pattern.

Detail - Machine Quilting Diamond Pattern

I haven't used Liberty fabrics for quite a while and had forgotten how lovely and crisp the finish is.  Putting the binding on this one was a dream.  I also added some corner pockets on the back so that it could be hung as a mini quilt on the wall.  It won't be on my wall, as this one a is gift.

Liberty Mini Wall Hanging - corner pockets

See more feathers here, here and here
Linking up with Confessions



Anna Maria Horner Scrap Fabric Neutral Feather No #3

Anna Maria Horner Neutral Scrap Fabric Feather

Here comes another Anna Maria Horner feather.  This one is made up from the scraps from my equilateral triangle quilt which I made last April with the Sassy Quilter  and is being modelled by Suzi the cat below.


Equilateral Triangle Quilt with Suzi the cat



The background fabric is  French General for MODA (#13529) which is a lovely natural linen colour.  I outlined the feather with stich in the ditch, outlined the shape again and then filled in the background with a free motion meander. 

Free Motion Meander quilting bachground

Not only is the feather made up from fabric scraps, but I also used some scraps of wadding for the middle.  Having made a few of these, I can tell you that they are quite addictive.  I just love how they come out so differently.

Anna Maria Horner Scrap Fabric Feather No #2

Anna Maria Horner Feather

A few weeks ago I mentioned that after making my scrappy Half Square Triangle quilt I had created a new set of scraps to use up.  They were mainly 1.5" strips from reducing 5" squares to 3.5" squares, so were quite thin and some of them quite short, but plenty big enough for another Anna Maria Horner scrap feather. 


Box of fabric scraps

I was working towards a particular colour scheme, so was able to pull out all the co-ordinating colours to foundation piece the feather.


Foundation Piecing Scraps

For the quilting I stitched in the ditch and then did a 1/4 inch outline around the feather shape.  Then I kept on going.  Because these are only small quilts / mug rugs they are a good place to experiment with new quilting patterns.  The trimmings from the HST's for this feather were only a drop in the ocean from my box of scraps, so I can see more of these in pipeline.


Scrappy Anna Maria Horner Feather Mug Rug

 Linking up with Connie at Freemotion

Anna Maria Horner meets Victoria Finlay Wolfe meets Celtic Solstice - Triple Whammy Mini Scrap Quilt Project

'Celtic Solstice Feather' 18.5 cm x 38cm

I expect many of you will recognise this pattern.  It is an Anna Maria Horner feather pattern which can be downloaded FREE from her website.  I have admired these feathers for a long time and the design was subconsciously on my To-Do list.  I think I only needed to do one to get it off the list.

'Celtic Solstice' Fabric Scrap basket

This basket of scraps has been looking at me since January from when I completed Bonnie Hunter's 'Celtic Solstice' Mystery Quilt.  I just needed the right project to use them up.  Just one of these lovely feathers would be the fix I needed.  I slightly reduced the size down to 90%, as I originally intended it to be a mug rug 'sort of thing'.  Now it is complete I might hang it on a wall.

Foundation pieced feathers

Because the scraps really were 'scraps', the lengths were quite short, some thin, so a whole family of feathers were not really the order of the day.  Using pages from an old Radio Times for my foundation paper, I randomly stitched down the strips, and then cut out the feather pattern.

Feather - Anna Maria Horner pattern

I love how the unruly scraps have been tamed into this shape, a shape that reminds me of a school tie.  It looks so neat.  The pattern was quite easy to put together and dragged my dormant dressmaking pattern cutting skills back out into the workroom.

'Celtic Solstice Feather'

After lots of auditioning from my fabric stash I decided to set my 'Celtic Solstice' Anna Maria Horner feather off with a  Moda 'Weave' #9898 grey fabric (I think I will need to add more of this to my stash), and a binding of a pink spotty fabric from the Chez Moi 'Boutique' range.

'made fabric' for quilt backing

For the back I wanted to try out another technique. This time is was Victoria Findlay Wolfe's 'made fabric' from her book ' 15 Minutes of Play'.  Again, the idea was to use up the scraps from my Celtic Solstice quilt.  I did this all from memory without actually taking the time to take the book off the shelf.  It took quite a while (more than 15 minutes ...) as I got caught up in quite a few cul-de-sacs, but I got there in the end.


Back of mini feather quilt

Here is the back of the mini quilt using the 'made fabric'.  I machine quilted it with a stipple, but I will admit that some of the seams of the 'made fabric' provided quite a lot of resistance and it would not be a backing fabric of choice in the future.

So, something a bit different here from Fabadashery.  Have you tried anything new today?