The quilt top is FINISHED!

It took what seemed like forever (although in reality I had a week off while waiting for interfacing... more on this later), but the quilt top is finished. Today I bought wadding and curved safety pins and three (!) different colours for quilting with. I just need to sew together the back and away we'll go...

Here's the whole quilt top (click thru to get a bigger picture on Flickr), measuring 47" x 62", pretty good considering I was aiming for 45" x 60". Yes, it's going to be a floor quilt at first, although it's going to need a lot of floor space!



The light blue sky fabric was problematic: I picked it up from my local stacked floor-to-ceiling fabric shop, and it was in with the solid quilting cottons, so I didn't think twice about buying it. Almost straight away when I got it home, I realised that it was a MUCH lighter weight cotton than quilting cotton is. I had visions of it tearing to bits under baby's bum scootching. Oh dear.

I ended up getting the lightest weight fusible interfacing, which seems to have worked really well. Its somewhat heavier than the rest of the fabric, but the seams press down nicely and it looks good, which is really all that matters.

Oh, and a bit about design: I thought very carefully about which colours I was going to use, and I settled on a palette of true red, green, and blue. I was not allowed to use purple at all, so periwinkle blues were out, and I also kept out teal. There's a limited amount of yellow and pink, just enough to add a bit of splash and verve. :)

Every house is in a different fabric, stretching the resources of my very small stash! There's only so much fabric I can justify buying for any one project, though. Most of the fabrics are fairly new but two came from my mother's stash and are at least 25 years old!

Here are some detail pics of some of the trees and houses I sewed since the last post.

Terraced Housing:



Shotover Park (a big foresty park near to our house):



A barn on a hill:



A castle and the sun:



The school, post office, and shop, which will all eventually have embroidered signs on them!: