Quilt Progress....a sneaky peak

Tomorrow marks the official end of summertime....boo! This reminds me of the picture I took at the start of the month of my hanging quilt peices which I hung on my curtain rail. It's sad to think these were the last few sunrays of the summer!



...the quilt is now fully pieced together, and quilted but I still havnt found a suitable backing fabric. Here's my problem:

My daughter loves the minky dot I used for my sons blanket, but I'm not sure if I could bind it due to the bulk of it.(Anyone know?/tried it?/seen it?) I've thought about self binding it with the minky but I think I'd prefer a seperate binding is I prefer the finish, but Im concerned as I have a stripy binding and think it might look too busy with all the textures and prints.

If anyone has any thoughts on using a seperate binding with minky dot, id love to hear them. I do wonder if a plain cotton backing would be longer lasting as both minky and fleece (which I previously considered) tend to look tired after a few washes.

So far I have had only one hitch. I pin basted this time, which I found a lot more succesful, but the drawback in doing this was a tear I found, and ofcourse I only found it once it had already been partially quilted!!!I have no idea how this happened, I can only think one of the quilting pins must have got caught on something, as it looks like a rip. Here is the offending square:



As you can probably see from the state of it, I tried to zig zag across it to fix it, but there is just no way I would have been happy with leaving it that way so I had to take the plunge and replace the square...not a very easy task but it would have kept looking at me and bugging me if I'd left it, so it had to go.

I'm aiming for this quilt to be ready by the time my daughter begins school on the 13th September so i still have a couple of weeks to mull this over.

Its been a wonderful month with the children. I wont lie, it was made A LOT easier because my husband took three weeks off every couple of weeks. I have really got back into going to the gym and as a result have lost half a stone which I'm really pleased about as I gained it just before Christmas and have found it quite difficult to shift. (now all I need to do is loose another half stone in preperation for this Christmas so Ill be back to normal for the new year!)

Right, im off to catch up on the 900+ posts I have missed out on during this month!
xx

Holiday project

Well, we are one week into the school holidays. My husband took a week off work and we have had a lovely time with the children. In between buying school shoes and uniform as well as household chores we have been to Bath to visit friends and family, visited legoland, and went to the cinema to see Toy Story 3. All of which didnt leave me much time for sewing, but my head is still buzzing with thoughts of new makes.

As my daughter will be starting big school in September, I'm using this as an opportunity to spend lots of time with her which means I will be slowing down on my sewing until the new term. (and then no doubt I will be getting exited about Christmas!) It is for this reason that I have decided to focus on just one project for the next month. I've decided that my project for the summer is going to be a quilt for my daughter.

Now I know I've mentioned before that I havnt really been inspired by the patchwork books I've read but a few of the more modern books have helped me come up with an idea that will help me use up my fabric scraps without the end result looking to mismatched what with all the different fabrics I'll be using.

So today, I have been getting to know my rotary cutter and mat. I want to keep this project really simple as it will be the first time I will be making a large quilt that will be going under my machine so I'v decided to stick to squares. The project will be for a single bed which my daughter dosnt yet have but I wanted to get a little more use from this quilt, hence the bigger size. Im hoping it wont drown her toddler bed to much before we end up buying a single.

Hope your all enjoying the holidays.

x