My Fabric Selection

OK, so I didn't exactly get what I was looking for ... but I found matching blue fabrics ...



Here you see:
- two sheets, middle and darker middle blue
- a pillow case (with a duvet cover off to be ironed) in blue-greenish stripes and flowers
- 10 inches of blue and darker blue patterned fabric
- approx five feet of darker middle blue with lighter coloured dots.

I've started washing and will iron and cut tomorrow, hoping to be able to pin it to the design wall so: continue to watch this space!

Off to the shops ...

Because sometime in early July, my next quilt is pegged for delivery as its soon-to-be owner is pegged for delivery herself ...

I will do a very simple design, machine-assemble and hand-quilt. In blues and greens, because the baby is a catholic girl and they wear blue - at least in these parts.

I already have three out of four or possibly five different fabrics and will go to my favorite quilt shop tonight after work to find something dotty - hence beautifully coinciding with my name. The others are solid, stripey and flowerey.

Watch this space for "before" shots.

Taa daa ....

I hope you can make out the "centre piece", a quilted sun.

Almost done

Tonight I will finish the quilting on my Safari Baby Quilt. It'll be washed on Friday for it to be presentable and usable on Sunday June 3rd, when I plan to gift it to a boy named Ferdinand Johannes.

Dreadline, hold on, no, deadline

But I dread it! My husband has booked a trip to go see the recipient on June 3rd. I must be done by then. But with just the quilting to finish - should take me about five evenings - and the whole thing to be washed, I should be fine, I hope.

All was well ... as you can tell ...

and I was very pleased ... until I turned the bugger over and saw ...



WRINKLES!!! Way more wrinkles than I could possibly bear.



So I undid all my quilting and painstakingly tacked and pinned the top to the fleece backing. It now looks like I actually know what I'm doing. I hate it when I think I can get away with skipping a step and then don't ...

By the way, the baby is one day shy of four weeks old now.

Quilting away ...

This is a tiny bit unwieldy at the moment but I am happily quilting along the lines my quilting pencil has now decided to leave behind on my fabric.

Sailing right along ...

I'm quite pleased with how the "body" of the sun turned out. I "measured" the middle of the quilt and folded away the outer third of the yellowy centre. Then I got out a dinner plate as stencil, plonked that down, circled it with a quilting pen, got out my embroidering frame and off I took.

Now I need to work on the sun beams. I will do a variation on below's sun with straight and curvey beams alternating and a total of eight beams. All I need to do now is figure out how to make myself a pattern to pin down.

Making my stencil

Then again, maybe not!

This is the throw I was talking about:



And the sun is way fussier that I remembered. I think I may have to design my onw based on this.

More ideas for bags:

I went to Brum this weekend. Brum, you may wonder? Yes, Brum, Birmingham, Britain's Second City ... and I found inspiration once again. I couldn't justify buying the bags because I have so much material to make my own - plus no real use for them. But I thought I'd "document" for future reference:







In the meantime, I finished applique-ing all those little animal squares. Now I'll tidy seams while working up the courage to start the sun design for the quilted middle. I'll take that off a throw I purchased ages ago ... and we shall see how well that works. I'm thinking baking sheets and pins will do the trick ...