When I entered the Pembrokeshire Country Show, at pretty much the last possible minute, I had more ideas than actual finished articles. I knew I wanted to do the two baby quilts for the patchwork quilt class, and had high hopes of finishing off mum’s door curtain and making up a new bag to enter into the patchwork items class, so I paid for two entries for each class and set to.
Unfortunately, I’m still getting a “feel” for how long the processes of making a quilt take me, plus often when I try something it will be for the first time ever. Although I’m a quick learner and like to be precise in what I do, it necessarily takes longer to do something one has never done before! So there was certainly no bag made. I did manage, in between stars and bees, to hand-applique most of the remaining fans to their backgrounds as originally intended, and they came out looking really well. After the show, I finished off the last bit of applique and assembled the blocks over a couple of Quilt Club sessions to give this:
(Yes, the layout’s a bit different.) I’m really happy that it’s looking like it did in my imagination (that doesn’t always happen!) and that my careful calculations for the fabric requirements were on-target. Yesterday, I went to buy some wadding for them – it’s rather unexciting synthetic stuff, but it should work for this – it’s not like anyone will snuggle under it! The backing will be fabric from mum’s stash; it’s an Oriental-ish print with scenes of boats. I believe it was once intended to be a dressing gown, but I think it’ll be perfect here. In this case, I’m not planning to use conventional binding for this project, and instead I will have a seam between the top and backing all around the quilt. I also need to attach loops or sleeves at the top for it to hang from. For quilting, I think I will need to use some sort of pattern to flatten down the blue-grey background fabric so that it recedes and enhances the window look, so I’m going to research Oriental-looking cloud designs to practice.
