Another week, another quilt. If only I could produce them as quick as that – it would be amazing! Instead many years ago (2003 I guess) I bought this next quilt as a kit from Glorious Colour which is a site where I can lose myself for hours! I wouldn’t normally buy a kit but at the time there were 2 dollars to the pound so it was really good value even with the shipping fees, so much so that I bought another kit, more about that another day.
There was a lot of cutting – is that a really stupid thing to say? Well, I guess some quilts might just be pieced in strips so maybe it’s not but as I wrote it I did think ‘isn’t that obvious?’. I pieced the pinwheels (a mere 72 of them!) and 36 bubble blocks (blocks with circle appliqués on) and then put them away in a box for a while.
Once upon a time my plan was to make a quilt for each of my children, but in 2009 we already had two gorgeous girls and no quilt for either of them! So as I was expecting child number 3 I decided it was really time to get on with it! I plugged away at it, the tricky bit is the placing of each part and having the space to lay it out, we don’t have an empty space in our house big enough and certainly nowhere to lay it out and leave it, so a complex system of pieces of paper so I could make numbered rows, lettered borders etc helped me know where each piece should go when it came to sewing it together.
The centre of the quilt is one piece of fabric with 72 circles appliquéd on randomly – except in my opinion that sort of thing can never be random, I didn’t want the same fabric or prints too close to each other (the kit contained a number of fabrics, some had the same pattern but in a different colourway) so it ended up being fairly scientific. Each circle is sewn in place with satin stitch.
Once the pieces were all sewn together it was time to quilt it! Each circle in the quilt centre has a circle stitched inside the satin stitch, the rest of the quilt has circles and swirls all over it, it was hard work but really fun just making it up as I went along.
If you click on this picture above and look closely you can see circles quilted on the blue flowery fabrics on the far left.
Here you can get an idea of the quilting involved by all the squiggles on the back!
Last job, to bind it, I searched high and low for some suitable fabric, ending up with a blue with random dots and spots over it which I made into bias binding.
Here is the finished quilt which now keeps my eldest daughter warm during those cold winter nights.
Like all the other quilts it just needs a label!
Absolutely gorgeous! There is so much work involved in quilts. I don’t have the patience! I love them though, maybe one day!!
What a fun quilt!
Sometimes they have to “marinate” for a while? 😉
Ann – I like the idea of marinating – makes me feel a whole lot better about the length of time they take!
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