I’ve begun the new quilt.

It has been crazy hot here for the last few days and Miss A has an ear infection, which has ruled out swimming. As you can imagine that has made for a pretty tricky week – there has been movies and shopping (both air conditioned) and play-dates, but finally today she was allowed back into the pool.

So while waiting for these supplies I have designed another quilt.

It is going to consist of 12 blocks each 10 inch square. The two edge strips will be white (and will work like sashing). I’ve been inspired by the Fenced In quilt in The Practical Guide to Patchwork (By Elizabeth Hartman). The remaining four pieces will be one of six fat quarters (in the image above).

My plan is  to rotate alternate blocks by 90 degrees (as happens in the Fenced In quilt).

I finished the quilt!

In the end I machined sewed (not very well) the binding to the back of the quilt. It certainly saved time and I will definitely do it again. However, I need to keep in mind a few things:

1. Cut the binding strips 2″ wide rather than 2.5″.
2. Once I’ve attached the binding to the front iron it away from the front.

This should mean that when I stitch in the ditch on the front (made by attaching the binding) I should just catch the binding at the back.

Another baby is on the way – due at the end of February (not me obviously!).

It is 30 charm squares and a white border. I bought the charm squares ages ago from the Fat Quarter Shop (sorry I can’t remember the name). Everything including the backing and wadding came from my stash (slightly embarrassing that I have so much stock piled).

I just quilted it using my swirly free motion quilting (see picture below).

This time I didn’t lower the feed dogs while doing free motion quilting. I read about it here and thought I would experiment. To be honest I can’t see that it made much difference – I won’t be dropping the feed dogs in future. I did change the stitch length to zero and everything seem to work as normal – there are a few places where my stitches are too big, but that will just get better with practice.

This quilt came together really quickly – about 5 hours so far and all I have left is the binding.

I made this backing for the dinosaur quilt. All the fabric is from my stash.

I thought Miss P might not be so keen on dinosaurs when she is a bit older. So now she can flip the quilt over and have a more grown up side.

I still have to pin it and quilt it, but I don’t have enough wadding and a trip to the fabric store with two girls is very unappealing, so I will wait until school goes back.

The quilt top is finally finished. I found attaching the white sashing to be very tedious.

I’m going to piece the back. As Miss P won’t always be keen on dinosaurs, I want the back of the quilt to be a bit more grown up and girly. My current thinking is to have strips of random widths and prints. I’ve started the cutting and hopefully the whole process won’t take too long.

I’m still here working on this quilt. So much cutting, sewing back together and then cutting again.

I’ve finished the cushion for Miss A.

A few things I discovered; vliesofix is fabulous, but there must be a cheaper way of buying it,  a finer blanket stitch was best (Mode 2 36 on my Janome 6600p), as the envelope style backing is quite generous a button is not required.

Here is a closer look at the applique…

I like the way the frill (extra bit around the edge of the cushion is created. Once the cushion cover has been assembled, turned right side out and pressed, you sew just inside the border seam.

The individual blocks are finished. I’m going to use white for the sashing and I’m just waiting for that to arrive (from here).

This is destined to be a cushion cover.

It has been sitting in my ‘must get around to it’ pile for so long I can”t remember even buying it, but I am determined that this is the year to complete projects and declutter the craft stash. The design is from here and the fabric is bits and pieces from my stash.

Using Vliesofix to hold the applique pieces in place made everything much easier – of course I still have to stitch around each piece, but at least I don’t have to worry about the pieces falling off or slipping around. Just need to remember draw the shapes on the smooth side and iron the rough side to the wrong side of the fabric – I had at least one gooey iron incident when I ironed the wrong side.