An ending and a beginning

A finished quilt for my dear friend Sara's birthday. The fabric was bought about a year ago after being inspired by this beautiful creation. Sara loves it and I'm so happy it's gone to a good home!

Here's a view of the back. The finished size is about 160 X 190 cm, and I squared off each block to 13 inches. Here's a good tutorial if you want to have a go at making some cross blocks yourself. You can vary the width and placement of the cross bars and the whole process becomes semi-improvised. The only thing I was fussy about was keeping the horizontal and vertical lines at 90 degrees because I like right angles!

I sandwiched the quilt on my bed - the only space large enough in my little flat. I used cotton flannel in the middle - mainly to minimise the bulk of the quilt to make quilting it easier. Another advantage of the flannel was that the front and back 'stuck' to it very nicely. It was easy to smooth out the creases and flip the quilt over without the whole sandwich falling apart. I used one pin per square and quilted in the ditch around each block. The quilting process was surprisingly quick and only took an afternoon. I bound the quilt in red and hand finished it. I really enjoyed making this quilt and have a vision of another one in pale acid pink and yellow and white. However.... I have lots of fabric to keep me occupied before I go out and buy more! Fabric like this:

Rouenneries Deux. I was so excited to hear French General were reworking this line that I bought four charm packs as soon as they were released. It's a long weekend this weekend and I'm going to make a good start on a quilt. The photo above shows two of the charm packs disassembled and squares of the same print paired together.

Next step was to sort the squares into pairs of reds and neutrals ready for my broken dishes blocks.

 Production line.

A finished broken dishes block. I just love French General fabric and am loving seeing these blocks come together.

Ten blocks so far - not bad for an afternoon's work. I'll end up with around 40 blocks altogether from the four charm packs. Each block will have a finished size of 8 inches - around 20cm. So with some chunky borders I'll end up with a good double sized quilt.

This morning after my yoga class I registered for the April Mariner's Compass paper piecing workshop at The Patch Works in West Hobart. I'm really looking forward to this. It looks like there'll be a lot of precision work required - and some curved seams! A lovely challenge. I've never done a quilting workshop before - I've taught myself from books and online tutorials - and am looking forward to being together with other creative people. I'll let you know how it goes!