I've been dipping in and out of an assortment of projects over the past few months. This project was on my very long list of Norwegian kits, and is called Britt-Lisa’s Blomsterkurver (Britt-Lisa's Flower Basket) by the Norwegian designer AnnAKa. I'd initially started this tablerunner back in May, with lots of machine piecing, making several basket blocks...
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...the fabrics in this kit are beautiful, and I chose a few Valdani variegated threads for these hand embroidered flowers, in colours to compliment the fabrics. The stitchery design was traced onto the background fabric using a lightpad and a Micron Pigma pen with a very fine nib, size 005. A lightweight interfacing was fused to the wrongside of the background fabric to give the fabric structure and to prevent shadowing of the embroidery the embroidery threads. Once the embroidery was finished, the handle was appliqued in place by hand using an Aurifil 80wt thread, and finally the handle block was machine pieced to the basket block...
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...once the runner had been pieced together, it was ready for the quilting process. I like the back of my runners to have pretty fabrics too, and saw this one on the Sew and So's website. Once the runner was basted together with the backing fabric and a layer of waddjng (my favourite is Vlieseline H630) it was ready to be quilted. As I was busy stitching other projects, it was put on the "to be quilted pile" where unfortunately it stayed for several weeks...
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...having a week on a quilting retreat in Yorkshire recenttly gave me the perfect opportunity to finally get the quilting completed! I've used a King Tut quilting thread in shade for both the top thread and the bobbin. I've machine quilted around the baskets, inside the handle, and a few straight lines around the 2 borders, then lots of wiggly-woo free motion quilting was used for the rest. This does take lots of practise, and my stitches are in no way perfect, but hopefully any wobbles won't be too noticable! I prefer to use a narrow single fold binding on my tablerunners, so this was then machined to the front of the runner...
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...the binding was then folded over to the back of the runner and hand stitched into place. This runner is embellished with buttons on each of the squares along the borders. I've used small wooden buttons which have been stitched in place with a DMC cream 8wt perle thread and a spot of fray check is on each knot to prevent it unravelling...
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...once all the buttons were stitched in place it was all ready for a photoshoot! The original pattern has four basket blocks for the runner, but I added an extra one as I wanted the runner to be longer for my dinging table. I also made a smaller runner with three blocks for my coffee table. This kit was originally purchased from Lappedilla in Norway back in 2011 - I'd bought several Norwegian kits that year, and now I can happily tick another one off my long list of kits, although I still have several more to make.
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