Quilt Number 8

This quilt has taken rather a long time to complete - it was intended for a friend on the birth of her son but the boy is now 9 months old and she has only just received it.  This quilt was constructed on a cookie cutter applique course at hometown, taught by Marion.  The actual applique side of things was relatively easy, cutting round templates, using wonderbond and then stitching round - but what was really interesting on this course was designing the quilt yourself. I made up the layout myself and the placing of colours and then added the applique to the appropriate squares. The planning of the quilt was quite intense as although you only needed basic maths it did require a lot of concentration to get right, you can see my plans below and the numerous attempts to get it right.

The colours on this quilt are very basic, red, blue and white but sometimes I think it is nice to keep it simple and I didn't want to make another green colour quilt. There was also very little in the way of patterned fabric, I didn't want to draw too much attention away from the applique.

During the construction I used quilters tape for the first time to set out my design on the wall and was really impressed with how it helped with the visualisation of the colours and did lead to a couple of changes to balance out the quilt.

I loved how the front of the quilt turned out, I used free motion quilting all over the quilt which worked quickly but it wasn't without its problems - I managed to get a huge pucker part way down the back but had quilted so much before I realised that it would have ruined it to unpick it. Also the tension went strange when I changed the bobbin.  But the reality is that the more quilts I make the more I realise that I will never make the perfect one as my standards get raised each time.

I will add more photos when I find where I have saved the ones of the wip, so expect this post to change in the nearish future.