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January 15, 2021
Owl Be Watching You from Quilt Art by Olena Pugachova

 It took me the first week of January to finish my biggest "debt" from last year. I posted about work in progress on it back in July and finished the top speedily, but then it had to wait for its turn to be quilted.

I designed the pattern specifically to use a sunset-coloured fat quarter bundle and my vision was based on stained glass cathedral windows (as you can see from some of the shapes that make up the background). Every quilter is familiar with the stained glass effect you get if look at a top against light, and here ...

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December 13, 2020
The Moonflower Block from Quilt Art by Olena Pugachova

We had a great virtual AGMof the Irish Patchwork Society last Saturday, and as usual, one of the highlights was a quilt challenge, this year it was to make a 15'' flower block using one colour only (various tints and shades of it).

Mine was a simple stylised flower in a sort of pinkish-purple colour which I don't even know the name of. Would you call it magenta? fuchsia? orchid? My phalaenopsis is kind of similar.


I was lucky to have a matching variegated YLI thread to quilt the background, it gave the simple block a definite level up ...

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October 16, 2020
Green and Grunge from Quilt Art by Olena Pugachova

Initially, I planned a wallpapered focus wall for my new living room, then the plans changed. I decided to have a mural instead, but I kept it simple, a stylised line drawing forming a sort of a frame with an empty space in the middle of the wall. And that empty space was meant for... a quilt, of course.

So, here it is, all done, but it's not on the wall yet, so we'll have an interior design update later, and for today it's all about the quilt. 

It follows the bedroom quilt in being purely abstract ...

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October 9, 2020
The Bedroom Allegory Quilt from Quilt Art by Olena Pugachova

This one has been mentioned a couple to times, you can see it in progress here and here, but it has since been quilted, so here's a little update on that.

I wanted to go totally Art Deco with it, pure abstract, although I do regard it as an allegory, I'm just not saying what of, suffice it to say it was meant for the bedroom.

As the shapes are quite simple I wanted to add detail with quilting using a lot of variations on pebbles, spirals, arches and s-curves.


The quilt design is symmetrical, so the quilting ...

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August 21, 2020
Harlequin Sunset from Quilt Art by Olena Pugachova

 To clear my backlog - here is one my favourite recent quilts, which has not made it to the blog for some reason yet.

I was very impressed by the possibilities of combining layer cakes with stack-and-whack techniques and thought I'd experiment with that some more. Previously, I had used a similar approach with improvised curve piecing, where each 4-piece stack was cut free hand in its own way, you can check out the Airways quilt and the Splash of Neon one. This time I wanted to cut all the squares in the exact same way to be able to ...

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August 11, 2020
Owls and Feathers from Quilt Art by Olena Pugachova

Ta-da! A big finish:


This is a bed quilt for my daughter's owl-themed room and I'm so excited to finish it as it has a lot of new-to-me aspects.

As I'm concentrating of curve piecing and developing a kind of Art-Deco inspired style with clean shapes and high contrast colours, I wanted to see how this style can translate to bed quilts. Me daughter's room already has curtains with an owl pattern that I designed and had printed at Spoonflower, and she said she would like a quilt in owl fabrics, too. I searched the Internet ...

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July 31, 2020
WIP and the Virtual Exhibition Season from Quilt Art by Olena Pugachova

I haven't posted anything for some time now, but I have three quilts in different stages of progress in the works now. I am supposed to be quilting the bedroom quilt, but I got carried away with an idea I had while waiting for the threads to arrive. 



I have had this sunset colours fat quarter pack since last year's Black Friday:


It was about a week ago that I had a vision of an Art Deco-style owl in these colours, and I just had to drop everything and draw the pattern and then start piecing. Most of ...

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June 26, 2020
The Bedroom Quilt from Quilt Art by Olena Pugachova

While waiting for quilting threads to arrive, I decided to piece a quilt top for the bedroom. it was designed and pieced in just several days as it consists of simple Art Deco style shapes.


The colour palette is one I plan for the bedroom in general (as I haven't made a new bed quilt yet). I seem drawn to teals and corals nowadays.



The top is curve-pieced (which is my go-to technique now) but I plan to add texture and interest with quilting.


It will, however, have to wait for its turn to be quilted, as I have ...

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June 8, 2020
Mad Tea Party from Quilt Art by Olena Pugachova

“Take some more tea,” the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
“I’ve had nothing yet,” Alice replied in an offended tone, “so I can’t take more.”
“You mean you can’t take less,” said the Hatter: “it’s very easy to take more than nothing.”

This is The-Big-Quilt-Of-The-Year for me and it turned out a bit more hectic than planned, but I think it's still a true rendition of the theme :))) Two of the previous posts show the background piecing and raw-edge appliqué in progress.

The idea was not to literally illustrate the text, but rather ...

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April 23, 2020
We Are All Mad Here from Quilt Art by Olena Pugachova

Finally working on a new quilt which I had been thinking about for a year now. With all the "practical" projects I did recently, I was really longing to something "arty". The general idea is playing with the Mad Tea Party theme (I have tea on my mind a lot for some reason).


So, the quilt is going to have a curve-pieced background and raw-edge appliqué, a combination of my favourite techniques, and a nice balance between the planned and the improvised. This is the original sketch for the background:


I was rather intimidated by the number of pieces and ...

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April 3, 2020
Locked In The Grid from Quilt Art by Olena Pugachova

Going back to some of the quilts made but not posted on the blog - this was another of those project long in the planning, but quick in the making. As I normally don't use a lot of black and white fabrics, I had to collect quite a lot of those for some time, on the other hand, the bright fabrics were quite hard to choose from, as I have a lot of those ;))



(I don't even have proper photos of this quilt, only those shot with the phone.)

So, the idea was to create a triangular grid in ...

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February 25, 2020
Quilt Modern Curves & Bold Stripes Book Review from Blossom Heart Quilts

There are some designers out there that have a wonderful eye for modern quilt design that make me a tad envious of their aesthetic… They design the kind of art I would love to have in my house as wall art, or on a mug, or as wrapping paper! And the quilts in Quilt Modern Curves & Bold Stripes by Heather Black and Daisy Aschehoug is exactly that.

Quilt Modern Curves and Bold Stripes book

Heather from Quiltachusetts and Daisy from Warm Folk teamed up to design and write an inspired book all about making curves and stripes with a modern difference. Ain’t nothing drunkard about these ...

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January 31, 2020
Funky Succulents from Quilt Art by Olena Pugachova

I finished this piece some time ago with the then-upcoming 3D workshop in mind, now the workshop is finished (and a great day all in all!) it's about time to publish it.


It is really a variation of the Succulents Sampler, with most of the plants the same, but just a different idea for layout, giving each little character more space to shine (and a brighter pot).

The Cactus:


The Echeveria:


The Aloe:


And the Fern:


As the aim here was not to use a different technique for each, the aloe is made in the same way as the ...

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November 26, 2019
Mini Masterpieces: Curves from Blossom Heart Quilts

The third section of Mini Masterpieces is all about curves – simple, complex, and improv. Are you ready to get your curves on?!

Mini Masterpieces book

Preorder Mini Masterpieces from these stockists

Simple Curves

Drunkards Path quilt block

What are simple curves? Where two pieces become one… square unit/block.  Like a Drunkards Path unit.

Liberty mini quilt

Jane for Ava & Neve made four of the sampler quilt block and turned it into a mini quilt – how beautiful are those colours?

Drunkards Path quilt block

Nicole from Modern Handcraft was the first person to come to mind to ask to join in the book hop for Simple Curves. Nicole and drunkards path blocks are synonymous ...

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November 10, 2019
Intertwined from Quilt Art by Olena Pugachova

Another backlog piece that I made in a hurry and had no time to post about. It was made for the "Threads without borders" EQA challenge and it got into the Festival of Quilts EQA gallery in summer.


The idea was to represent the Earth as a cosmic ball of yarn, with all sorts of stuff intertwined and brought together so that it cannot be pulled apart.


The hardest thing, as it often happens, was selecting the fabrics to form the gradients of colour for each "strand" so that they finally come together as white. The top is all machine-pieced ...

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October 21, 2019
Baby Butterflies from Quilt Art by Olena Pugachova

I was very good this summer and got out several UFO projects to turn into baby quilts. Here is a glimpse of my design wall at the peak of activity:


The blue and white had been packed away as a top for about four years, now it's finished and donated to a charity (Heart Children Ireland). I didn't even take photos of it finished, but I really like it.

The buttefly blocks for a long time were my go-to samples for the curve piecing workshop, the orange one features in the curve-piecing tutorial here on the blog. Now ...

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October 14, 2019
Meanwhile in the background... from Quilt Art by Olena Pugachova

I had a very nice day of stitching with my sewing group on Saturday and managed to do quite a lot with little interruption. I came with the fabrics selected and the idea in my head and went home with the thing quilted and almost bound. but it's not a finish, it's just the background for hand-appliqué .


It's quite small, of course, something like 16'' by 32'', the colourful squares are improv curve piecing on the stack-and-whack principle, the cream ones are just plain and they are going to host the the appliqué.


I used my favourite ...

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October 12, 2019
Trade routes from Quilt Art by Olena Pugachova

This quilt was made for an exhibition organised by Irish, German and South African quilting societies. The theme was Interchange Threads Connect, and one of my first thoughts was about the Silk Route, after all, it has the interchange, it has the threads, and it has the connect, too. I was thinking of making an appliqué of camels and oriental patterns, but then opted for a more abstracted interpretation that played on the interconnection of land and sea trade routes.


The main thing here is the colour - the contrast between the teals and the golds and the nuances of the ...

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  • curve piecing
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