My first quilt from my own design

 I have finally found time and confidence to design a quilt from scratch. It has been in my head for some time and the idea came together from two lovely and quite different fabric collections I acquired. One was a gift and the other was a purchase I couldn't resist.

It's not finished, but I have done enough to show you and see what you think.

Ooops - sorry about bag waiting to go to compost heap underneath!

There is still room for improvement in my photography (and it was a very windy day but I was desperate for outdoor light) but I hope you can get an idea of what it looks like. I bought five half meters of Sakura Park fabric from Moda and framed 5.5 inch squares of it with strips from a pre-cut Bali Pops Breakers.

Here is a close up.

I'm really pleased with how it has turned out so far. Since these pictures I have put on a 6 inch border in blue batik fabric and am just working on a pieced border of 2.5 inch squares alternating between plain blue and the patterned fabric

I am enjoying the designing so much I shall definitely try designing again. I am wondering how to quilt this - perhaps something grid like to go with the very square style pattern - or something more free motion? It's only a relatively small quilt so either would be possible. I'd love to hear you suggestions.

Baby quilt and a short tale of unpicking!

This is a quilted baby mat which I made over Christmas. It's a present for one of my daughter's friends. The design is my own and it makes full use of a layer cake of Deb Strain's Family Tree fabrics.

 I put together the top on Boxing Day and it was very easy to do. I sandwiched it with two layers of wadding so that it was nice and thick and then quilted it on the machine. So far, so good. I made some straight binding for the edges out of the fabric left from the outside of the squares and machined it on. I had a go at the method described in the Red Pepper Quilts binding tutorial for machine binding which I found really easy to follow but decided against this for this quilt as the different colours of the binding meant my (not very accurate) stitching was very obvious. I will definitely give this method another go. Then I sat down in the evening to hand stitch the binding. Just as I had got to the final side of hand sewing I realised that I hadn't caught a couple of small sections of the edge of the quilt under the binding.

I checked it over and decided I could re-machine it in the places where I had missed the next day. Then I went to bed and thought about it ..... Have you ever made something where there is a mistake and left it and even though only you know it is there it gets on your nerves? I can remember doing this with a knitted jumper and avoiding wearing it because my eyes were drawn to the mistake. So the next morning it was out with the stitch ripper and all the binding came off.

It took about 45 minutes to unpick but I know it was the right thing to do. I forced myself to go slowly so as not to damage the quilt top and I rescued all the binding to re-use. The next picture is me at the ironing board picking all the little bits of cotton off with sellotape before ironing the binding. Grrrr!

You'll be pleased to know it all went back on fine and definitely reinforced the lesson for me that if you have made a mistake that is going to get on your nerves it's better to re-do it than spend lots of time fretting about covering it up. Is that a moral for life I wonder??!