Quilting

This is one of the things I am working on at the moment. It will become a quilt to cover my front door. Block 15 of the 24 needed is almost done. The pattern is Midnight Fireworks from the Millefiori quilts book 1 by Willyne Hammerstein. I am using the Inklingo shape collections to print the cutting and sewing lines on the back of the fabrics for all the pieces.

A lot of you will wonder ‘why make a quilt to cover a door???’

 

Well, that started a few years ago when I started trying to figure out how to cover up the half round upper windows in my bedroom. I have a street light right in front of my bedroom windows. I had mini blinds for the bottom part of the 3 windows, but nothing for the top ones, since at first I figured, no one can see in those. But then I started being bothered by the light shining into the room all night. Yes we could have done the same as some of my neighbours and got specially shaped blinds for those windows, but….. those are boring.

So, one day I thought that maybe it might be a good idea to make something out of fabric to cover those windows, and came up with the idea to make shaped quilts for those. I did some machine embroidery on fabric, made a paper pattern of the window shape, sewed a cotton batting and some fabric for the back, didn’t bother with quilting. At first I tried using some kind of tubing inside the rounded part to fit them to the window, but after a while decided that that wasn’t working. Velcro to the rescue, staple one side to the window frame, sew the other side to the quilt…. bingo, works great.

Then I started noticing that those quilts actually kept out both heat and cold, specially the heat, since my house faces west and is at the top of a hill, so from mid afternoon until the sun disappears behind the mountains, the heat blazes into the house in the summer. So I decided that the mini blinds that kept nosy eyes out of my bedroom (which is on the 2nd floor, so really not a lot), but did nothing for keeping out heat and cold. So in the last few years those were also replaced by quilts.

And of course, since my living room is on the same side of the house, with the same windows, those needed quilts as well. This time they were actually quilts with pieced tops, though the top half round ones I did some ‘stained glass’ type applique.

 This picture doesn’t show them very well, but at least it gives the impression as to what I am talking about. The bottom half of the quilts just have velcro along the top, so I an take them off when needed, and I have  strips of velcro for each of them that will hold the rolled up quilt if I only want to uncover the windows for a short time. And boy, do they ever keep out a lot of heat, al I need to do to find that out is to try and peek out during the afternoon, and feel the heat behind them.

Now I have a front door that has a big window in it, and 2 side windows, and I started noticing in the last couple of years that the reason my AC had a hard time keeping the house cool was because of the amount of heat that those windows let in during the afternoon. Last year during the heat dome when the temps here went up to the mid 40’s Celcius I actually taped some fabric over those windows, and came to the conclusion that I needed to make quilts for those windows as well.

This is the top for one of the side windows, just have to add batting and backing. I have the other one partially done,

Yes I know, they are not done to stop the heat from coming in from the current heat wave, but hopefully they will all be done before the winter and help keep the cold out.