I’ve been on annual leave this weeks and I have to admit I’ve had rather a nice pottering week, despite getting a cold and cough (isn’t it always the way!!) I’ve done bits of gardening, bits of sewing, even a bit of housework for good measure! I’ve done workshops, walks and had a lovely weekend with my daughter home. I’m trying to keep up with my plan of a couple of hours housework, a couple of hours gardening…and then several hours sewing…sounds a good balance to me!

I started another quilt, I know, I’ve got two on the go and another waiting to be quilted. However I wanted to make a quilt for a special young lady I know who after five years hard work, qualified as a pharmacist this summer – I think that deserves a quilt as a well done!

It needed to be a fairly quick quilt and after a conflab with her mum purple was the chosen colour (a girl after my own heart!) I selected some Lewis and Irene fabrics in Samuel Taylors. I really like this range, it’s sort of traditional with a modern look, if you get my drift. The passion flower ones were the starting point, but I loved the bee and dragonfly ones too, so a touch of mint green was added.

I decided on disappearing four patch as a pattern. I’ve done a couple of disappearing nine patch quilts recently where you stitch nine squares together then cut them into four. This is the other way round, you stitch four squares together and then cut it into nice, rearrange and then stitch them back together again. There are various variations on this, you can do the cuts diagonal, wonky…or keep it simple kike I did. I started with 7″ squares, stitched them together and then cut 1.25″ either side of the seam so once it was stitched back together again I would have 2″ sashing round the square sets. I managed to take a photo of the four stages of this block.

I made thirty blocks altogether, so the quilt is 6 x 5 blocks. I tried stitching them in a bit of a production line and whilst my systems did improve, I always ended up getting the stitch ripper out at least once per batch! Each block, in theory, measured 12.5″ square, there was a bit of variation in mine so I decided to trim them all to 12″, it was definitely a good move, I was able to check the centre seam was in the middle so when I stitched them all together they went together pretty well.

It took a while to arrange them all, I wanted a bit of order to it so it’s not just a random pattern, it didn’t help that I got them all in a nice pattern on the floor and then I realised the bees were all flying the wrong way, so I had to turn everything! I feel the quilt needs a narrow ivory border and a wider dark purple one now, so this ones going to have to wait until I can get some more fabric. I can hopefully get my jacket stitched now 🙂