oooo, hello!

good lord. two months? rubbish! in that time, we've had a sneaky october break to sunnier climes, come home & lost internet connection for almost a month & also pretty much lost the will to live with a company whose name begins with B & ends with T. anywoo, they cannot be to blame for my lack of posts since we were reconnected, that's entirely my bad.

so...what's been happening? well i've got a bundle of little deadlines to adhere to before christmas, and the boys break up this week so i'd better get a wiggle on, hadn't i? one of my self imposed deadlines has been a quilt for a friend's birthday. now, this has been quite the challenge for me because i'm not a 'proper' quilt maker really - i think i've only ever made one quilt for a bed before, and actually i haven't really here either, it's more of a throw. i'm not very good at restricting myself to one repeated block, i'm pretty much a 'more is more' person. but the recipient of this quilt is a 'less is more' sort of person & she's got to live with it, so i've been super good & made a really simple 9 patch quilt, using CK-esque prints (but i'm afraid not actual CK fabrics - i went into the shop in cambridge to buy some & can i just say, the quality is pretty dire for £14 a metre!) some prints i had in my stash, but i bought the rest from cally & co which were much nicer quality for a fraction of the price. i wanted this to feel quite modern and light and wanted to have a large expanse of neutral, but felt just cream would be a bit overwhelming so tempered it with a splash of off-white. this also meant that some of the light background prints all went with either one or the other as not all were cream or white.

i designed the quilt on touchdraw on my ipad which was really useful to get an idea what the quilt would look like made up - such a useful tool! i couldn't bring myself to do each block exactly the same so i created my 9-patches randomly. mum quilted it for me & added the binding onto the front. i spent last night pinning the binding to the back & i shall spend the next few evenings happily hand stitching it down. i hope to heaven my friend likes it, but if she doesn't, i'd be happy to keep it!

quilt details incase anyone fancies having a go at it, it goes together super quickly!:

9 patches cut 4.5" - finished blocks 12.5"

4 calico blocks cut 12.5"

12 off white blocks cut 12.5"

2 calico border sides cut 14" x  61" (approx)

2 calico border ends cut 14" x 85.5" (approx)

quilt size is approx 83.5" square - the quilting made it smaller by around 2.5"!

quilting design is an edge to edge called feather meandering by linda taylor