Over on ‘Confessions of a Fabric Addict’ Sarah has launched her fifth Hands2Help quilt challenge where quilters from all around the world make a quilt for charity. There are three charities to choose from this year, two in USA and one in Canada. What I think is also a great idea and a very generous offer, is that for those of us further afield Sarah has offered to quilt the quilt, if we send the completed top and the backing. I still haven’t decided if I’ll take her up on this offer to save on postage, as I could really do with the practice of machine quilting another quilt.

This is a pretty big challenge for me, as it has to be posted by June 12th! I’ve only made three quilts so far and they have taken on average 18 months to finally complete them!!! I’m going to make a scrappy quilt, I’ve seen lots of scrappy quilts on facebook and they always look great. I checked my scrap drawers and I’ve got loads of jelly roll lengths that my mum gave me when she was clearing her fabric stash, they look like Moda, lovely fabrics, just not me…they’re brown and I don’t tend to do brown!! Whether in my home or my wardrobe, there’s blues, purples, greens, red, but very little brown! I found a pattern in ‘Quilting for you’ magazine for a quilt called Razzle Dazzle which looks fairly straight forward and also says ‘quick to sew’. I’m going to make it! I’ve even found a length of material from my stash for the backing.

I’m hoping to gain a lot too from this challenge, learning to do a different quilt design,  using up my fabric stash (one of my New Year resolutions!) and having another go at machine quilting – I can only get better!!

This is my progress so far, stitching the lengths together, I’m starting with the full length ones first, I can then use the shorter lengths to make a border if I need to increase the size a bit.

Hopefully you will be able to see my progress over the next few weeks, if you fancy making a quilt for Hands2Help then go over to Sarah’s blog and sign up for the challenge!