6 Creative Links, a Quilt Hanging Sleeve, Fabric and Cats

Hello there and welcome back to Bonjour Quilts. Can you believe it’s the weekend again already? Lucky us! Keep reading to hear all the latest news.

From the Sewing Room…

What’s going on behind-the-scenes in my sewing room:

Quilt Hanging Sleeve

If you tuned in last week you’d have read all about my adventures hanging a quilt on my wall (and a flannel sheet for a design wall). My short cut was to tape a hanging rod to the back of my quilt for quick hanging. A few of you were a little aghast that I would put tape on quilts! It’s true, I’m not overly precious with my quilts, but I can understand it gave some of you heartburn. That’s never my intent so I decided to put those fears to rest by changing out the tape for a quilt hanging sleeve.

Here’s what I did, in case you’re interested.

I’ve made a few quilt hanging sleeves in my time so I thought I’d try something a little different with this one. You might recall my plan is to change out the quilt on my wall from time to time. It’s a fun way to change the home decor and it also helps me put all these quilts in my cupboards to use. This was the reason I wanted to use tape. The idea of sewing a new sleeve every time I swapped out a quilt…well, I’d probably end up not changing the quilts very often. So I thought, what about an extendable sleeve? i.e a long sleeve that I could fold the unused portion back on itself. It was worth a try!

I started with a 6½” x 70″ piece of fabric. I don’t think I’ll hang anything that wide but at least all my bases are covered that way. First, I hemmed the short edges by turning them over a quarter inch, twice, and pressing. Then I sewed the hems in place.

Next, I ruled a pencil line 2″ from each of the long edges, all the way along the length of the fabric.

If you’ve made quilt hanging sleeves before, then you’ve probably ironed these lines into your fabric tubes (they guide where you sew the sleeve to your quilt). As I planned to pin this sleeve, and reuse it many times, a crease wouldn’t be enduring. A pencil line on the outside of the sleeve means I can easily re-iron the creases in the future. *I recommend drawing the pencil lines on the other side of the fabric too, you’ll see why later.*

Once the creases were ironed, I sewed the long edges together to form the sleeve. (As you can see below, I forgot to iron my creases until after I’d sewn my seam. Take it from me, it’s much easier to iron those creases when your sleeve is flat fabric than when it’s a tube!)

A few notes on my seam choices here. Normally I like to sew my sleeve wrong sides together so that the right side of the fabric is on the outside. The seam is also on the outside, but I like that because if the seam allowance is inside the tube it can catch when you push the hanging rod through. I made my sleeve from a 70″ length of fabric that had already been sewn together from pieces, with seams on the wrong side of the fabric. Given that these seams were already on the wrong side, I also sewed my long sleeve seam on the wrong side too. I know it takes some mental gymnastics to follow all that, but hopefully it makes sense! As the quilt hanging sleeve is hidden behind the quilt, it doesn’t matter to me which side of the fabric is showing.

Once my sleeve was sewn I then turned it wrong-way out in preparation for making it the correct length for my quilt. Once it was wrong-way out, I started to turn it right-way out again, turning the tube on itself.

When you first start, the tube is still very long. Then the tube gets shorter as you turn more of it on itself. Eventually you get close to the width of your quilt. Try to keep the seams on the tube in line so the tube doesn’t twist on itself. I like to have my fabric hanging sleeve 2 inches shorter than the width of my quilt, so there’s an inch of clearance on each side. Slowly turn more of the quilt sleeve until you hit your perfect length.

As you can see below, you end up with your sleeve having both sides facing out, in part. That’s why I recommend drawing the pencil lines on both sides of the fabric.

Now that I had my width sorted it was time to pin the quilt hanging sleeve to the back of my quilt. The reason we pin along the pencil lines is because they maintain some slack in the sleeve. That slack is very important as it’s where we need to slide our hanging rod. You can see the slack in the photo (cross-section) of the quilt hanging sleeve below. It’s more than I needed for the dowel I have, but I was future-proofing it.

I pinned the sleeve with safety pins, making sure they didn’t poke through to the front of the quilt. Remember to pin the shorter section between the pencil lines, as the other section has the slack you need for the dowel. Where the quilt hanging sleeve is doubled over, you can just pin through both layers. Having the pencil lines is very handy for keeping it all straight and untwisted.

When I hang my next quilt I’ll be able to slide the quilt hanging sleeve in or out more, to match the width of the new quilt. My next cunning addition to this set up is an extendable curtain rod to replace the fixed wooden dowel. That way the sleeve and the rod will both be able to change lengths as dictated by the quilts. Beats having 20 different length dowels clogging up the garage! (I’m glad my sleeve has some extra slack as I suspect the curtain rod will have a greater diameter than the dowel.)

Flannel Sheet Design Wall

I also fixed my flannel sheet design wall, which you may recall came under a cat attack. I simply folded the top of the sheet over the dowel and safety pinned it in place.

As I had cut the dowel longer for the design wall, I had room to put some curtain rings on each end of the rod.

I’m in two minds about this. I like the fact that if the cats try to climb it again, the rod will likely fall out of the rings, protecting the sheet from being shredded. But the idea of it falling down in the middle of the night (which is when the naughtiness always happens) doesn’t fill me with joy. There’s nothing scarier than the sound of something in your house falling down when you’re fast asleep. Then again, if it scares the crap out of me then it will also scare the cats, and they’ll hopefully never do it again. So far, the design wall has been hanging in this new configuration for 4 nights without issue. Let’s hope it continues!

Creating the hanging sleeve at the top of the sheet also shortened the design wall a little. This was perfect as the bottom of the sheet no longer covers my power point. Win-win!

What I’m Buying…

Fabric, of course! What else? I needed to add some extra fuchsia Ruby Star Society fabrics to my stash for my upcoming throw-sized quilt. Quilt mock-up seen below.

Luckily Polka Dot Tea here in Australia had quite a few of them (I wanted 4-5 different fabrics for a scrappy-ish look). While I was there I thought it would be silly not to get some extra low volume stash too. Then I started looking at all the other beautiful colours and realised I was now overstepping my design brief so I quickly checked out before I got myself in trouble. It’s so hard when all the fabrics are so pretty!

For those in Australia, Ange at GnomeAngel is closing the fabric selling part of her business and is having a clearance sale. It is such a good deal – 60% off any fabric if you order 1m or more of it. But only for June! I dropped in to see if there were any neutrals for background fabrics, happily there were. These 5 fabrics are all Ruby Star Society too (I seem to be gravitating to their colours these days). Three are variations on beige/cream, one is teal and the other is smoke. Very nice and I can see them making great background fabrics in future quilts.

Lest my North American readers feel left out, Fat Quarter Shop has 20% off all Moda Grunge fabrics for June. These read-like-solids fabrics have interesting low volumes as well as a full range of vibrant colours. I also found two new-to-me ranges in the Grunge; these polka dots and then these stars. The stars in the aqua and also the cream are sooooo good, they’re my favourite (at the moment…)

Around the Interwebs…

An oldie but a goodie if you’d like a detailed quilt-along for a baby quilt. Rachel at Stitched in Color will take good care of you with this series of blog posts.

I’m always on the look out for different scrap-using ideas/crafts; this video shows a cute way to use smallish scraps.

Speaking of small scraps, don’t forget this tutorial for making use of postage stamp size left overs. Here’s another one in a similar vein (but a bit more Bonjour).

If you’re feeling a little *extra* today then you’ll love this artist’s lux embroideries. Golden goodness.

Some beautifully serene artwork created from paper and thread.

Reader Quilts…

I always love to see quilts you’ve made from Bonjour Quilts patterns so please keep sending them in! Either email (Kirsty at BonjourQuilts dotcom), or tag me on Facebook or Instagram.

Alison sent me a couple of photos of two amazing quilts she’s made. First up is a bold and beautiful Scrap Magnet quilt with lots of colour:

Alison made her next quilt with the Scrappy Cross patchwork block tutorial. I really love how many of the quarters are fussy cut – so much fun!

Katla has sewn up a striking version of Diamonds in the Deep:

Maggie Anne sewed up this Vote Mini Quilt for the last US election. Time sure flies, here we are at election time again.

Libby sewed up this gorgeous baby quilt following the Wildwood Baby Quilt Tutorial.

Chez Bonjour

Winter is not just coming, it has arrived. My poinsettias are looking very festive, hopefully they’ll still be red once ‘Christmas in July’ rocks around.

This plant is a favourite of mine and inspired a festive glow-up of my Fleur Mini pattern last year.

The two eldest kids are both in their mid-year university exam schedules and will be happy when that’s over. The younger two kids can’t wait for their high school semester to end in 2 weeks’ time so they can enjoy the school holidays. For the cats school holidays mean a lot of this:

When they usually get peace and quiet and a lot of this:

Oh well, that’s the way it goes when you’re a much-loved cat in a house full of kids who like to cuddle!

That’s it from me this weekend. Thanks for coming by and I hope you have a wonderful weekend full of quilting or some other creative pursuit. Until next time,

Kirsty x

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