A small diversion

I needed to do something fun and for me, well, mostly for the wee girlie.  I've admired what this talented lady does for a while and thought why not?  A lovely simple square patch quilt in fun bright spring colours.

 Just a small quilt, using fabrics only from my stash and simply quilted in the ditch.


....



....



....



... and then I cut it....


....

Five times in fact...



....



....

 But for good purposes.

 You see it's an old pram (made when 3 wheelers were a new thing), a hand-me-down that has been oh so useful but in desperate need of jazzing up.  In winter it has a sleeping bag (which can be seen here, gosh wasn't she small back then!) for keeping little bodies very warm and snug, but it's spring and I wanted to capture it in quilt form.  So to speak.

And the quilt-as-you-go dream?  It's still there, and I'm going to make a start.... soon.... honest....
(Tamsyn's hat is from Foal Design)

A quilt for a little man called Felix

I meant to post this last week and not have so big a gap between posts.  But hey, I'm just over 6 months pregnant and baby brain has been quite intense this time, not to mention the tiredness and just plain laziness...  I seem to reserve most of my strength for Tamsyn and the bare minimum of housewifery.  Even though I make sure I read (almost) everyone's blog each day, comments may be brief.  I think "cool!" has been all I can manage some days.  :/

I don't altogether see this as a bad thing, my body is working hard at growing a little person and apart from the occasional meltdown things have been pretty cruisey.

Felix's sock monkey quilt was the first I've ever made where I didn't have a plan other than doing a whole heap of bias squares, and the width of the fabric (all half yard cuts) dictated the size of those squares.  I thought I'd leave the Brady Bunch style fabric whole which would be good for alternating blocks.  When it came to laying out the blocks on the lounge room floor after Tamsyn had gone to bed one night I had come up with a star style.  Ant looked at it, screwed up his nose a bit and said "how about this instead".

I knew he was right.

It's the first quilt I've made purely out of flannel: front, back and binding.  I made sure there was enough fabric left over for a very scrappy back and did some basic machine quilting.  I'm never going to do a purely flannel quilt again, it's so much more temperamental than quilting cotton - it seems to give/stretch more, but I'll continue to use it as a backing fabric.  That works well.

Next up, I want to try my hand at some 'quilt as you go'.  I've been quilting for over 20 years and have never tried it.  I've also been inspired by what this talented lady can do here and here. Oh and here too.  ♥