Block Patchwork Quilt

It's half term again! Hurrah! Time for crafting, and I had some very important crafting to get on with.

There will be a rather important arrival before Christmas, and therefore lots to make.

So, I started with a quilt. I've never done any quilting before. I bought a book to show me how.

Had a quick flick through. Completely disregarded the information and did it my own way. No one actually reads instructions anyway...

The difficult bit was to choose the theme and fabric, I don't know the sex of the Baby yet, so it had to be something gender neutral, (and although it meant taking out a small bank loan) I wanted  to use a Michael Miller fabric, essentially because they're pretty lush. I may have had to order some Christmas fabric at the same time...

So after much deliberation I chose this Circus fabric, and then some coordinating grey chevron fabric and yellow fat quarters.

 

Then I had to do some planning... uh oh... but I managed it quite successfully, and worked out how big to make each block and the order to put the different fabrics in. Some proof that I didn't just go ahead with scissors!

I choose to make it 40x48" in the end, from 8" squares, apparently when quilting you only have a 1/4" seam allowance, which was helpful because I had only just enough of the chevron fabric to make enough blocks for my plan!

 

Next to start joining the blocks together into lines

 

Then join up all the lines to complete the front, pressing all the seams as you go

 

Then layer it up, this was quite tricky to get everything to stay flat. Initially I bought thick wading, but this was a total disaster, too thick to go through the machine and just messy. I thought it would be nice to be thickly padded so it could double up as a floor play mat, but it just wasn't happening. Another visit back to the fabric shop to buy "Quilters Dream" which just looks like thick felt, and very expensive - but you get what you pay for, and it looks much better made up.

Next was to do the actual quilting, I don't have a walking foot on my machine but at this thickness my regular foot worked ok. You then just follow all the join lines on the front of the quilt.

 

I cut some corners by not using bias binding, the thought of making 5m of bias binding was not a thought I liked, so I just cut my backing fabric 2.5" bigger all round, and folded it over to make the edging.

 

Ta dah!

The finished quilt: