Quilts by Christmas Update.

Hello friends, I hope you've all had a lovely festive holiday and a very happy new year to you all. I spent the holidays surrounded by all my favourite people and LOTS of delicious food, it was brilliant. However, now the holidays are over it's way past time I updated you on my crafting progress...

Way back in October I challenged myself to make 2 quilts by christmas, joining in with a great challenge from Elise. Unfortunately I only managed to finish 1 of them before Christmas and I'm still working on the other but I am delighted to have made my first quilt, I love it, and more importantly so does my Mum. Wanna see?...

I'm so pleased with how it turned out and I'm pretty impressed that I managed to finish something on such a large scale.

My favourite part of making this quilt was sewing together the quilt top. It was great seeing the triangles turned into squares, squares into rows and finally rows into one big rectangle, so exiting seeing the pattern come together gradually.

I used a white bed sheet for the backing, it has a lovely soft texture for snuggling under. For the quilting I used white for my top thread and blue on the bottom,unfortunately this picture doesn't really show the blue against the white very well, but it looks great in the flesh.

Getting the quilt through my sewing machine was the toughest part of the whole make, the poor thing needs a break after sewing through all those layers. I walked away with many a pin scratch and a rather sweaty brow! I even managed to break a needle, oops! I'm  glad I persevered though because I think the diamond pattern looks great, especially on the back.

For the binding I used leftovers from the quilt top fabrics, not only did it save me some money (I was originally planning to do it all in one fabric but I couldn't find anything I liked) but it turned out even better that I expected, I love how the colours and patterns look next to the plain white background and I think a new colour or pattern would have been too much next to the busy-ness of the quilt top.

I hand sewed the binding to the back with a blind stitch which took AGES, I even roped Chap in when I'd had enough, he sews very well! I think on my next quilt I'll cheat and machine it!

It was pretty hard to part with this baby but my Mum absolutely loved it and spent all afternoon snuggled up under it on Christmas day (as we watched and fell asleep in front of Doctor Who, it's something of a Christmas tradition in our house) so it was totally worth it. It looks great in my Parents room as they decorated it in blues and whites, which Mum thought was a fabulous coincidence, it wasn't; I totally planned it that way!!
Have you made anything recently that really pushed you? Any great gifts for friends or relatives?

Alice xxx