Friday 27 November 2009

A Christmas quilt

Last Christmas I made snuggle quilts for my middle girls and my son was a bit upset when he didn't get one too. My youngest two children are away visiting grandma which has given me plenty of time today to finally get started on his quilt which, fingers crossed, I will actually finish in time for Christmas!

I had trouble deciding on fabrics for this and eventually settled on a fat quarter pack I found on ebay, Moda's Dinosaur Uproar range. Here they are, all folded nicely.

The supplies!


Next I had to pick a pattern. My vast prior quilting experience (three doll quilts and my girl's lap quilts!) has been a case of winging it, I decided it was past time I actually opened one of the qulting books I got from my Secret Santa last year and lo and behold, there was the perfect pattern!

The Pattern


The book is Fast Quilts from Fat Quarters but I must say that, so far, it hasn't been particularly fast lol! The first step was to select ten of my delicious fabrics and cut them all up as per the book's cutting plan. I actually used the bottle of spray starch that I picked up about three years ago and apart from the funny smell I liked it, it made the fabrics a lot easier to handle. Here they are, all cut and stacked ready to piece into the blocks.

Ready to piece


After working on and off for about five hours I've finished six of the nine blocks. I'd still be going now if I hadn't come across a slight hitch. The design uses more of triangle D than the plan lets you cut from 10 fat quarters, I'm going to have to either piece lots of little triangles into bigger ones or butcher my large squares. I vote for butchering!

Here are the six finished blocks, they're all slight variations on an Ohio Star block and will be 12" square when it's all finished.

Block 1

Block 2

Block 3

Block 4

Block 5

Block 6


What do you think? I'm pretty pleased with these so far, I've finally cracked the "scant quarter inch" idea and my seams are matching up much better as a result!

4 comments:

  1. wow! Excellent work! I am very impressed that you are going from winging it to stuff with triangles. Well done :)

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  2. Fiddly little beggars aren't they? Repressed memories of third year geometry have been surfacing only to be frantically stamped back down again.

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  3. Wow, they are fantastic!! Lovely bright colours too! Once I've got all my current WIPs out of the way, I would love to do more patchworking. So far, I've made a few patchwork cushions, but only using 4.5" squares. I find cutting the squares out quite tricky, especially as my cutting board is always smaller than the fabric piece I'm cutting and I only have a foot ruler. Is it worth spending on a proper quiling ruler (the see-through kind) that I've seen in hobby shops do you think? It would be worth it if it made the job quicker, but they're quiet expensive, so I always talk myself out of it.

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  4. Sorry Pippa, just seen your comment now. Yes, the see through quilting rulers make a *huge* difference, you get much more accurate cuts and it's a real help squaring thing up. I'd definitely recommend getting at least one, I use a 12.5" square, 6.5" square and a 6" x 24" rectangle. Fab fab things!

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