Sunshine quilt

Sunshine quilt

Monday 25 August 2014

Quick and easy quilt and a rant about prices!

I am making a quilt for a wedding present for my daughter to give to one of her friends. It needed to be a simple pattern that I could make out of one Jelly Roll which would be big enough to sit under but not huge.
Here is my design




It's a really straightforward square in a square pattern. My daughter chose a Chloe's Closet Jelly Roll and with 42 strips I got 42 squares - just. You might be able to see a couple of the squares down the left hand side are a bit scrappy. I made the border out of some lovely Robert Kaufmann fabric I got out of a Craftsy reduced fabric bundle - 14 yards for some ridiculously cheap price and lovely soft fabric. I can highly recommend the Craftsy supplies section - even with postage to the UK I think it represents excellent value and a really quick service.

My daughter, who is resolutely non- crafty laid out the pattern and I think she has done a good job. It's not entirely random as it has the yellow through the middle, but it looks quite scrappy which I like. I'm busy quilting it at the moment and it is looking good. I've used a plain spot background which I got for about £3.50 a metre. So all in all I hope this will make a lovely unique present at a reasonable price. I also used some large pieces of wadding which I had left over and they have worked very well. I spray basted them and just overlapped them and you really can't see any joins. It's quite heavily quilted so none of the pieces should move now.



While we are talking good value - I had an email from QuiltHome in the US advertising 20% off Kaffe Fassett fabric. I was so pleased with my Shadow Pinwheel quilt I want to make another using these fabrics so I am collecting them. I just refuse to pay the £13.00 per metre typical of UK prices. Anyway I have just ordered 8 yards from QuiltHome that works out at about £6.50 a yard including postage. I realise I may have to pay tax but even so it is just so much cheaper than buying in the UK. It makes me a bit sad as I know we should be using our fabric shops in this country, but this is just too much of a difference to ignore.

Anyway - hope you like my quick and easy quilt - I've loved making it and I am very much hoping its new owner ( wedding in October and not ( I hope!!) a blog reader) will love it too!!

Just to add - I had about 5 inches left from several strips so I am going to join these with some fabric left over from my daughter's table runners at her own wedding and a few 1930's reproduction fabric scraps I have by me to make the binding - so not a scrap of that jelly roll wasted!

Sunday 10 August 2014

Scrappy quilt - first stage finish


This is the completed first stage of my truly scrappy quilt. You saw the first quarter of it here - we thought it looked a bit like a delta wing plane - but now it has all four quarters in place and as I thought the pattern has emerged much more clearly. I am pleasantly surprised by how it has turned out. As you can imagine the piecing was a bit tedious. I am convinced quilting is good exercise as I had to get up to my ironing board so many times it was like a workout. Initially I worried about the inaccuracy of the piecing. I found it was almost impossible to get perfectly accurate joins with rows of 21 squares at the longest point especially because there was such a wide variety of fabrics in terms of stretch. However once I got into it I realised the main thing was the overall effect which is not troubled by any dodgy joins!


What I love, and I hope you can see is that I really have raided my scrap bins. I haven't cut into new fabrics and you can see there is real mix of fabrics. I had to have a pretty wide interpretation of the 'light' team as otherwise I would not have had enough but I like the mixture of fabrics a lot. I also like how each one reminds me of where and why I bought/acquired it. For example the blue/white, pink/white dots were a gift from my daughter, the bottom middle dark pink was from my mug rug partner in Holland - I could go on for hours ....


All that remains now is to add the borders and quilt. All in all a successful project so far - all the better for the fact that I did not have high expectations of this one. Hope you like it!