Last night over on Sugar Lane Designs, Wendy was hosting another Friday Night Sew-in with Friends. Well this week I’ve been beavering away on a quilt for Hands2Help and last night was no exception. I have to say, I’ve even impressed myself!! I signed up to make a quilt for the Hands2Help Challenge  on Tuesday, you can read about it here. One of my concerns was that it usually takes me months to actually finish a quilt…well I have surpassed myself…quilt is pieced and quilted, all I have to do is the binding!!

I used a pattern in this months Quilting for You magazine called Razzle Dazzle and a load of Moda jelly roll lengths my mum had given to me, they’re very nice, just not my colour. Rather than stitching one big rectangle of jelly roll lengths, I stitched them in lengths of 7 (mainly because I had 21 full lengths) which I could then cut into nine 14″ squares. Eight of these were then cut diagonally into 4 triangles, two of which were stitched together to make the final square patch. I could then use my square quilters rule to trim them to a true square. I was surprised that the final square was only 9″, I still can’t work out if that’s about right!

I played around with the squares for ages until I was happy with the arrangement. I tried random, I really did! Somehow a slight bit of order always sneaks in, before you know it I’ve got a pattern!

The 16 block centre was only about 36″ square, I needed to get it up to about 48″ so I added some borders. The left over jelly lengths were stitched together in size order and trimmed to 2 1/2″ lengths to make one border with a dark brown strip either side. I still needed an extra few inches so I used some of the backing fabric for the outer border.

Unfortunately this meant my backing fabric now wasn’t quite wide enough…talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul!! I spotted a few odd lengths of the jelly border, stitched them together and had just enough to go down the middle of the back, and that extra 2″ made all the difference!!

Last night I quilted it, I had a few problems sandwiching the layers, the central block was fine, it was the first brown border which caused problems as it wouldn’t lie flat, I’m wondering if its because it was stitched onto bias cut fabric. I ended up putting a couple of tucks on two sides which helped but it still wasn’t perfect. I’ve quilted the squares with a large triangle  and a small one, I’m still not sure if that is enough or if the big triangle needs more quilting on it. I might put a question on facebook about that one! The border I quilted with a zigzag pattern following the squares, I chose that as I thought it would be more forgiving than a straight line with the border issues, it worked so well I did a second one to make a chevron pattern!

All I’ve got to do now is bind it…a quilt in four days, gosh!!!