Friday 21 August 2015

Shhhhn secret quilting project in progress...

I can't believe its two years since I made this quilt, its fair to say there was a fairly big pile of left over bits...


They've been needing to be made into another quilt for some time...but no inspiration came along.  Then a conversation with the original quilt's owner lead to the revelation that her mum had a big birthday in 2015, and had always admired the original quilt, was there enough fabric to make a small sister quilt version?

Of course, as I had a full 15 months to make the quilt between our conversation and the birthday I waited a full 11 months before I got started...
Finally spotted some inspiration in a magazine and got started in May....


 Better clean the fluff from the bee bunting out of the machine before I get started...


First to draft the centre "medallion".  Baking parchment, pencil, ruler and squared paper are perfect for the job...

 

 

Four pieces together make a medallion centre....


I toyed with the idea of turning all these tiny scraps into a dinky border...

 

But they were just too tiny so I abandoned that adaptation and returned to the pattern.... half square triangles becoming a string of flying geese for the first border to the central medallion...

 

 

It was mid June by the time I made more half square triangles into whirligigs for the second border...




A further white border and I had to admit this was as big as this quilt was going to get, time was running out...


Thankfully I had both a piece of wadding and a piece of backing fabric that were big enough to get it to the next stage of actual quilting...

 

I had a fabulous day quilting in my friends garden, I was kept fed and watered (ok cake'd and tea'd)


And was able to push on and completed the quilting in one day...

 
 

I have to say..I'm loving this wandering butterfly pattern....


It was much admired by the end of the day...


You can tell that I was focused on getting this completed as I didn't manage to take any photos of binding the quilt.  Let me just confess that binding was made easier by the fact that I completely over estimated the amount I needed for its big sister so actually had enough left over to bind this one without making any new binding.  (You can see it rolled up on the top left side of the first photo in this blog)

So it was the beginning of August when it needed to take a trip through the washing machine to wash out all those pencil quilting marks...


and as we were experiencing some typical August weather it had to dry on a rack...


before being pinned to the living room carpet for 24 hours to block it straight.


It was then carefully wrapped in two plastic bin bags (!) to deliver it through more typical August weather a whole 48 hours before the BIG birthday.

I understand it was much admired and coo'd over when presented to its new owner.  She is a lovely lady and I hope it keeps her toes warm in bed for many more birthdays to come.

2 comments:

  1. Stunning Helen, stunning - it really does make good use of those boxes (and boxes and boxes) of tint scraps - stunning!

    ReplyDelete
  2. My what a lot of bee fluff! It is gorgeous; what a lucky lady! Should I hint that you have two years to my next big O?!?

    ReplyDelete

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