I can now share pictures of the quilt that I made for my parents-in-law for their Christmas present. They seemed really pleased with it, and once it was in place on their bed, Sid the cat wasted no time in making it his space. That's a pretty good endorsement of a new quilt in my book!
This quilt was quite a long time in the making... I started the piecing at the quilting weekend we had in Frome back in July. Goodness that seems like an age ago!
I played around a bit with the block layouts before picking the final arrangement. Here are the options that I looked at...
This is the classic Furrows arrangement of log cabin blocks.
A few people on Twitter liked this 4 diamond arrangement.
But the winner - by quite some margin - was this Barn-Raising arrangement. So I sewed the blocks together in that arrangement over the quilting weekend, and the top then languished on the side for weeks and weeks, while I steeled myself for making pieced borders for it.
Sometime in November I got some sewing mojo back and completed the borders - even managing to get half of the corners to match up perfectly in my first mitred border.
I'm not sure if that was brilliant technique (thanks for the tips Anne!) or just beginner's luck. I certainly found it more intimidating to do than my normal arrangement, but I'm sure that I'd get more confident with practise though.
Are you ready to see the finished quilt?
This is the back! I pieced together all of the leftover bits, the spare lengths of Summersville, and added them to the plain red. This was just enough fabric to make up the back.
I sewed a label in calico - I used a split stitch over lettering that I traced from a printout I made in Word. Simple, but effective. I fixed it to the quilt with bondaweb and then blanket stitched it down.
Here's a peek at the corner...
And, TA DAAAA! The whole thing.
I finished with the smallest of margins - the last stitches were complete on Christmas Day in the evening, and we exchanged presents with my in-laws on Boxing Day. My Mum helped by holding up the quilt for photographs in the morning, before we drove down to Dorset to see Jim's family.
The quilt used 0.5m each of 8 fabrics from the Summersville range by Lu Summers from Moda. I also used about 3.5m of plan red fabric for the centre squares, framing border, binding and backing. The finished quilt is about 56in square (1.4m square).
