Last month I fell for another quilt design by Andrea Walpole of Raggedy Ruff Designs, I made her Spring Wreath quilt a couple of years back and I still love it. A few weeks ago she showed on facebook the first central block of the winter wreath and I was hooked immediately, it’s a beautiful barn owl in flight. I’ve signed up for the monthly kit which will start in a few weeks.

This is my Spring Wreath quilt to give you an idea of what it will be like…

In the meantime I thought I really ought to start another Raggedy Ruff quilt kit I had in my stash, the Secret Garden. This is a very colourful and busy quilt with lots of flowers and birds. I’m going to try to make this quilt top before I start the next one, or at least get ahead with this one and then alternate between the two! I don’t want to end up with two quilt kits in my stash!!

With this in mind, yesterday I pulled out Block 1 of the Secret Garden quilt from my to-do box…

One thing I particularly love with Andrea’s quilts is the backgrounds, they’re always such a wonderful mix of blocks, colours and textures with linen’s mixed with batiks and little pops of colour.

The first task was to make the background. I find these fairly straight forward as Andrea’s instructions are pretty clear with written instructions and diagrams. I do have to concentrate though, the seam ripper usually comes out at some point, as it did with this block – it’s so easy to put something the wrong way round.

With the background complete I could then turn my attention to the applique design. The individual shapes are traced onto freezer paper, which can then by ironed on to the batik fabric, this makes it much easier to cut out the fiddly shapes but afterwards it just peels off the fabric without leaving any residue.

The only bit I changed was the tail of the wren, to me a wren’s tail has to be pointing upwards. As it’s such a busy design I numbered the shapes so I could work out which was which once they were cut out, I did get a bit muddled trying to work out which rose was pink and which was peach, in the end I decided it didn’t really matter and just went with what I thought looked right from the photos.

With everything cut out I then laid them in position on the fabric. The instructions include photos of all the important stages, I often find these easier to follow than the diagram as you can see how the applique lies on the quilt background.

Andrea just holds the pieces in place while she stitches round each bit, I’m not that brave so I put a tiny blob of fabric glue on each piece so at least if I sneeze the whole lot won’t fly away!

Hopefully tomorrow I will start the free-motion embroidery which brings these designs to life. If you fancy having a go at one of these quilt then have a look on the Raggedy Ruff website, there’s lots of designs and kits.