After a busy 2017 it was lovely to be able to close the year with a walk to my favourite place by the Atiwhakatu stream.

The perfect companion was Silver Fern, one of the colourways for my 2017 Mystery Quilt 'All Aglow'.

This pattern is now available in my Craftsy store

The Silver Fern is an emblem of New Zealand and can be found everywhere in the bush. It is also the emblem of our mighty All Blacks rugby team.

The weather has been mixed this Christmas but New Year's Eve was a beautiful day, with a light breeze (which means quite a strong breeze in the Atiwhakatu valley!) and lots of sunshine.

The place by the stream is about half way to the mountain hut, about an hour and a half's walk from the car park for me and enough of a good stretch after not doing much exercise all year.

I love taking  a quilt with me, they have so many uses! This time it was a great cover-up against too much sun as well as the biting sand flies.

Eating my lunch by the stream I heard a pair of Kereru...

The last few months have been really busy with the New Zealand Quilt Symposium plus a trip to Quilt Market in Houston where I was lucky enough to meet up with Kristy Lea of Make Modern Magazine. When I got back home I was excited to see the launch of Issue 19 of the magazine which contains the first block of my Mini Wonders sampler.

This sampler is made using my 60 degree patchwork technique, which is also the method for my Modern Triangle Sampler quilt.

Make Modern is a digital magazine, which is fabulous as you get a huge amount of content in each issue and can just print out the patterns you are interested in. Subscribe to this magazine by following the link on the right hand side of this page.

I hope you will have a go at Mini Wonders. I love the beautiful Alison Glass fabrics in the project, the ones in the photo are Sunprints, and I am now making another using her latest Diving Board range. Another really exciting part of going to Houston was meeting Alison, and I came...

Do you know someone who loves Knights of old, castles and dragons?

This new range from Dear Stella is called 'Winter is Here' and I just love the colours as well as all the cute motifs!

These fabrics were just waiting to be sewn into something fun, and Linda who tests lots of my patterns set to work. Today she brought along the completed Toy Box quilt.

Out in the garden taking photos I laid the quilt on a bush and the goats next door took quite an interest!

On the back of the quilt we used the castle tower print

We loved creating this quilt and you can make one too as this range is now hitting the shops.

The pattern is listed in my Craftsy Store.

Contact your local quilt shop to buy these fabrics. If you are in New Zealand you can order a kit from my shop, Quilters' Lane in Masterton.

Wholesale pattern enquiries - contact me if you are interested in stocking this pattern in your shop.

Welcome to the 2017 Fall mystery blog hop! I am so excited to be starting this blog hop off and to tell you about this project.

For those of you here for the first time, my name is Sheila Christensen and I am a quilt addict - so much so that I bought the shop! I have been the owner of Quilters' Lane in Masterton, New Zealand, since 2011. In 2012 I designed my first Mystery Quilt.

How does the Mystery work?

• We offer a choice of colourways and sizes.
• Each month for ten months you receive a pack of perfectly cut shapes and instructions for sewing them together.
• You can follow the clues as people post them on facebook in our friendly group.
• In the tenth pack you get instructions for putting the quilt top together.
• Mysteries start in February (New Zealand and USA) and July (USA only).

I love seeing all of the different mystery colourways coming together, and our facebook group is a great way for Mystery Quilters to interact and share the buzz! Anyone can join the group and it is a...

Last week I made a new table runner, Circle of Stars

I used traditional Christmas fabrics, but I can't wait to see what other colours people will pick for their own runners.

I am busy working on the pattern and will release it soon, as well as teaching the class on August 18th. For now I am getting started on quilting my sample, so I thought I would share the process with you.

I am using fusible cotton batting from Hobbs. This batting is perfect for smaller projects as you can iron it in place, eliminating the need to spend ages pinning.

Use plenty of heat and maybe some steam to make sure it stays in place. I also put a few pins just around the outside. The fusible is not permanent, so if you get any wrinkles you can pull it apart and iron it down flat again.

I put all the layers together and then gave it a good iron - being careful not to twist.

The next step was to choose a thread. I love variegated thread so I picked this cotton one from Gutermann that highlights the...

This week I have been fussy cutting hexagons for the new triangle blocks I designed. I wanted to share with you the really easy technique I came up with. I'm sure this must have been done before but I haven't seen it around.

For the new blocks I released last week I have decided to use Tula Pink fabrics. There are so many wonderful motifs just perfect for fussy cutting and I wanted to explore this for the triangle based pieces in my quilt.

Here's the hexagon I cut out with just two cuts:

Isn't it cute?

So here is how I did it:

Step 1:

My hexagon needs to have a finished height in the quilt of 4". I cut a 4 1/2" strip, fitting in the pattern I wanted:

Step 2:

Fold the strip of fabric in half - note, the fold is at the bottom of the photo.

Step 3:

Place your 60 degree ruler on top of the strip. Line up the centre line of the ruler with the centre of the pattern you want to fussy cut.

If you have a ruler with a tip like the C&T ruler here, put the 4 1/2" line on the fold.

If...

This month I have been visiting family in England, and while I am here I have been teaching my Triangle Block Party class.

My walk this time doesn't include a quilt, but look at these beautiful native bluebells that adorn many English woods at this time of year

When I was a child, we would gather armfuls of bluebells to enjoy, but these days it's not allowed, and really so much better to see them in swathes in their natural setting. My sister, great niece and I loved our adventure in the woods, and the added bonus was a beautifully built wooden playground.

After a bit of catch-up time, I was off on the train to Huddersfield. Nestled in the Peak district in the North of England, Huddersfield was at the heart of the wool trade in the nineteenth century, and many mills have now been converted for new purposes. Four trains from Bedford, I arrived in the village of Slaithwaite (pronounced 'Slawett'), and met Justine and Lisa, who run Simply Solids. It's a great shop stocking a fabulous...

This year's southern hemisphere summer is drawing to a close, and it's been a bit underwhelming. Usually we get weeks on end of long, hot days when all you want to do is lie under a tree and take a nap, but this year there has been rain, and days when the weather has blown in a big chill from the Antarctic.

Officially we are now in Autumn (New Zealand classes its seasons in complete months - in England it wouldn't change until the equinox). However, this weekend we had blissful summer weather - not too hot to go outside, it was just calling me to make the most of the warm weather.

The quilt taking an outing this weekend was Candy Drops. I designed this quilt for our Shop Hop last year, and the pattern was published this week in the digital magazine Make Modern, Issue 15.

It's surprisingly easy to squish a quilt into your backpack - this is quite a small pack that my Mum bought me for a significant birthday. It holds all the necessities - emergency kit, spare layers, lunch, tea...

The #totallytrianglequiltalong has started! It is so much fun to see the blocks that are being made. I hope you will join in. This is my first block, the Triangle Nine Patch.

You can see other blocks in the triangle quilters facebook group - anyone can join even if you just want to take a look for now. You can also see them on Instagram.

I will be posting more blocks on here as well as some tips for sewing with triangles as we get further into the quiltalong.

It can be a bit scary trying something new, but everyone who has tried these blocks seems to get into them really quickly and enjoy making them. You can get the pattern from Quilters' Lane, or from my Craftsy store. Why not have a go?

Though you may feel a bit like I did when I got back into going for walks in the bush last year, and was faced with walking across this swingbridge for the first time....

....just take a deep breath, be brave, and you never know what fun is to be had on the other side.

Here's my Lonestar...

2017 is going to be my year of the Triangle! Will it be yours too?

Triangle patchwork blocks are so much fun to cut and sew - they come together really quickly and are a lot easier than they look!

I'm also excited that the Sampler quilt has been accepted into Quiltcon, so if you are going to Savannah in February do look out for it.

To celebrate the launch of my pattern, I am running a Quiltalong on Instagram starting on January 7th 2017. See further down this entry for details.

The pattern for the Modern Triangle Sampler is now available in my Craftsy store here and also from Quilters' Lane at www.quilterslane.co.nz. I will have physical copies available in the shop also.

The pattern is about 80 pages long and includes detailed instructions on how to cut all the shapes in the blocks, 25 block patterns and also finishing instructions for putting together a sampler quilt.

Welcome to the Totally Triangle Quiltalong!

 Join me on January 7^th 2017 for the start of...