Day 7 of my challenge to make a quilt in seven days

Hurray! I have completed my challenge, even though It is 18 days since I started the project I decided that I would only count the days that I worked on the quilt. is that cheating?

I am so proud of myself 🙂

I know it’s not perfect, the blocks are all slightly different sizes, the cute birds look more like evil crows, (that’s if you can even recognize them as birds) I forgot to embroider the legs on the birds, and a million other mistakes. But I made it all by myself and it’s not a complete disaster.

I start of today making the quilt sandwich. The backing was cut from the same sheet that the blue squares and bird house was cut from, the wadding/batting was purchased from Hickey’s in Galway and the quilt top was made by me 🙂 .  I cut the backing and wadding slightly bigger than the topping. When it was all laid out I smoothed and pinned the pieces together, I have some lovely heart topped pins that came free in a craft magazine, they are good and long so were perfect for pinning through the layers.

I have been looking at all the wonderful quilting methods but decided to keep it as simple as possible and am going with the ditch method (quilting along the block seams). I also decided that this bit would be done with a sewing machine.

I haven’t used my machine in ages so thankfully I did a test run on some scraps, the tension was off and it took me ages find the instructions and workout how to put it right. With a lot of fiddling with the stitch size and tension dials I finally got it right. I started of by stitching around the border and then the cross sections to divide the quilt into 9 squares. This was a mistake, I should have sewed the cross sections first, because the quilt puckered slightly at the joins.

I cut the cushion backing from the pale pink shirt used for the background of the bird blocks. made an envelope style opening, by making one piece 3/4 the height of the cushion and the other piece 1/2 the height of the cushion so that the cushion pad could be inserted easily and I didn’t have to buy a zip or other fastenings.

Leave a comment and let me know what you think of my first patchwork.

Now to  start thinking about my next one !!