A finished quilt!

I am ridiculously proud of this quilt, especially as it's only the third one I've ever made.



I had a bit of trouble photographing it, between the auto-timer, the sun, the wind, and my well overdue bump. Plus trying to avoid all the enormous spiders and spiderwebs which are everywhere in the garden at the moment!



You can see the back of the quilt there, in all its chartreuse-ness.

Here are some close-ups of the quilting, which I did in a swirly zig-zag, with accents of stippling and swirling.

I used 7 colours to quilt with, because I couldn't stand the look of light thread on dark fabric, at least for this project! I also could use a machine with a stitch regulator, I've got horribly uneven stitch lengths. For my first go with a free-motion quilting foot, however, I think it's pretty good. :)









If I were to do this over again, I would make a narrower road, with no white dashes - these were boring to sew and a real pain to get lined up around the middle bit!

Finished dimensions: 44" x 59"

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!:

Bank Holiday Weekend

What I've been up to this bank holiday weekend: I started a massive mission to create a quilt for the child-to-be, something I dreamed up a while back. Since it will definitely be a floor quilt to start, it made sense to make a quilt that would be interesting to lie on and use. I thought about those car mats, whiere there are lots of roads and buildings and things to interact with, and went from there.

Here is my current rough plan:



Not too many roads, no. My first plan was much more literal, an attempt to reflect our neighbourhood. This one's a bit looser, but still includes our house, one of the semi-detacheds in the middle bit. Each square represents 6 inches of quilt.

I finished the middle bit today, which is very pleasing, as it involved a lot of brain-rending piecing. I had to be extra careful, because I only had a fat quarter of the green-with-daises-and-snails. I made it with a small bit leftover spare. Phew!



Here are some other houses, plus a church, which I've completed for the project:







I feel like I've completed the most difficult bit. Next up I'm going to create lots of road!