Friday 5 October 2012

The birdcage

I finally finished the quilt that I gave a sneak peek of earlier.  This quilt is made of scraps and nine-patch blocks left over from the quilt I made as a wedding present.


I didn't have enough nine-patch blocks to make anything decent sized, so I decided to slice them up into quarter square triangles and mix them up with the light fabric.  Also, I had never pieced triangles before and scraps seemed like a good place to start.


Really, this quilt is just the result of me playing around with fabric.  Once I had finished the central part, I decided to add the plain narrow border, and then the border of the bird fabric (part of the Nest line by Valori Wells) which was a feature fabric in the original quilt.  I really wanted to use this fabric in large pieces so that the design was shown to its full potential.


Once the top was finished, it sat in my cupboard for over a year before I was ready to quilt it.  This is the first quilt I basted, and the first quilt I started quilting.  I stitched in the ditch around the blocks in the centre of the quilt, and on the diagonal.  Then I had to work out what to do with the border.  I needed to do something straight-line, and decided to quilt straight lines from the inner border to the edge of the quilt, spaced about 1 cm apart.  It took ages, and is the reason why I got a whole other quilt basted and quilted before I finished quilting this one.  The border quilting alone took me about eight hours in front of the machine (not all in one go, obviously).  However, I am really happy with the way it turned out.  Close up, all the quilting lines in the borders make it look a bit like the birds are behind bars - hence the title to this post.



The back looks cool too.  The striped fabric is from Spotlight.  I am quite a fan of stripes for the back of a quilt - is anyone else with me on this?


This quilt is an awkward size, about 50 inches square.  A bit big for a baby quilt, and too small to sleep under.  Nevermind, I will keep it, since it is my first quilting attempt.  Do other people like to keep their "firsts"?  Since this was a keeper quilt, I hand stitched the binding.

5 comments:

Catherine said...

It's a lovely quilt - I love the way you've used the birds as a border, and the way you quilted it is great. I also love the stripes:-)

Fran said...

What a gorgeous quilt! It's so pretty, and I feel very inspired by the quilting.

Angie said...

This quilt is fantastic---you did an awesome job 'playing' with the fabric. :) That border fabric is gorgeous---great job on the quilting.

Deb@asimplelifequilts said...

I love your quilt. That border fabric is amazing, your quilting looks great and the colors are so appealing. Great job!

junacreationsuk.blogspot.co.uk said...

I love it, it's beautiful. I didn't keep my first quilt, but I do visit it at my mums, I have kept the next three though, and they're all on smaller size, but too big for cot quilts, so they're on the sofas and I still love to look at them and check out my favourite fabrics from that time.