Spring Quilting

It wasn't until I was editing the photos for this post, and trying to decide on a title, that I realised how well the colours of this quilt fit to Spring. The beautiful, bright rainbow really brightens up the room, and when you look at it, you can't help but feel light and happy. Perfect for a little girls room.

There's very little frugal about this quilt, it's made from (almost) all new material, and didn't come cheap, although the main body of quilting is made from material I have had in my cupboard since before DD was born. I didn't even buy it myself, my mum saw it in her local quilting shop, and couldn't leave it there. 24 fat quarters, hand dyed, all in carefully arranged shades through the rainbow. (Although we only used 23, several of the pinks were so similar I took one out, as the quilt was going to be very long anyway). I have put off cutting up this material, trawled through many quilting books and magazines for the perfect design, but eventually it was time to just give it a go, and we decided on a really simple design, that would show off the beautiful shading without any fancy patterns detracting from the simple beauty.

First step was to cut the material, not into squares, but into strips. We were going to carefully measure each one, but in the end, we just cut along the fold lines, giving us 4 strips very close in size to what I wanted.

I worried for a while about how to keep the colours in order, as some of the shades are very similar, and in the end we decided to lay them down in order. We pinned each colour (4 strips of each) at the top to prevent them blowing away. (This is on my mum's veranda, you can see the grass in the top left hand corner, so it was a little windy.)

This type of quilt is much easier (and quicker) to sew with two people. My mum sewed each strip together as I handed them to her in order. If I had been on my own, I would have had to constantly get up and down to get each piece, and I'm sure some of them would have ended up out of order.

I was a little concerned about how to keep track of the order anyway, as so many shades are so similar, but came up with this simple strategy to keep it in order. Each time I took a strip off the pile, I turned the pin the other way. That way I could quickly and easily work out which strip to grab next. It worked too, not a strip out of order.

Once we had joined all 23 strips, we then sewed the first strip to the last one, making a continuous loop like this. I hope the photo shows what I mean, as this is the step that made doing the staggered pattern so simple and easy. We made 4 of these loops.

Each loop was then folded into quarters, and cut into strips the same size as the origional strips (so that the patches would be square). As you can see here, there was a small bit at the end left over that wasn't big enough to make another strip, but those will get used later.

Then I unpicked one seam on each strip, moving one square through the colours each time, and sewed these together (as we went). This was a little tricky, as some of the colours were hard to tell apart, but in those cases I looked back to a strong colour change, and worked from there. Again, I did the unpicking/arranging, and my mum sewed. I deliberately arranged it so that the pink colours were around the middle of the quilt, as my DD loves pink. We picked out a pink border at the local quilting shop, and found some bamboo wadding for the middle. If you haven't heard about bamboo, it's a wonderful new alternative to cotton, which is grown with far less pestasides, making it far more gentle on the environment. And it has a wonderful, silky soft feel. Seems almost a shame to hide it away in the middle of a quilt!

Of course, the quilt isn't entirely new material. The backing is a white sheet I bought at the local op shop for $4! And the bias strip around the edge is the end bits left from cutting out patched strips. It was almost exactly the right size to go around the quilt, only 4 squares left over. Quite an economical use of material really.

Doesn't it look beautiful on DD's bed? She loves it, and has been sleeping in her bed again since we bought it home. She had had a run of bad dreams, and moved back in with us full time, and I was hoping this would make a difference, which it has. Not that we mind having her in with us, in fact DH and I both sleep better with her nearby, but I also want her to enjoy her own room, which she is now doing. We bring her in with us when we go to bed, so that she isn't waking up alone in the dark.

For anyone who is thinking of trying their hand at quilting, but is afraid to give it a go, don't be. My mum and I aren't perfect quilters. We don't measure things terribly carefully, and if we make a mistake, we don't let it stop us. For example, we cut off the edge of one of the last strips by acciden, so that it was about 5mm shorter than all the other strips, but carried on anyway, and in the end, you can't even tell which one was the shorter square. I also accidently bought about 2 inches less batting than we needed (I forgot to calculate for the wider border), so that it doesn't go right to the edge, and had a similar problem with the backing, but we just fix those up, and keep sewing. In the end, these little mistakes are unnoticable among the larger quilt, a quilt that never would have been finished if we'd let ourselves be deterred by simple mistakes.

Happy Sewing!