Scrap Bag

When my first niece arrived I had actually been organised enough to make a quilt before she was born. I gathered a heap of old vintage chenille pieces, mostly from ebay. I collected brights, so the quilt was be suitable for either a boy or girl, and sashed each of the 6″ blocks with a white tone-one-tone stripe. Very simple, but lovely in my sister’s nursery. The quilt ended up being used as a mattress cover, as my niece slept in one of those sleeping bags. She liked playing with the chenille as she fell asleep. Anyway, one evening she wasn’t a well girl and the quilt came off second best and my sister threw it in the laundry sink with some water over night. Well turns out quite a bit of the chenille I bought was not the original colour. Someone had dyed some of the chenille to get the brighter colours, but had not washed the excess dye out. Very frustrating and ended up with one ruined quilt.

So I had to make another quilt. I collected some more chenille, thanks to my lovely friend Jodie Chenille (well thats what I call her) and was going to make the same quilt but in much prettier chenille. However I changed my mind. I had some scraps of Amy Butler fabric, mostly from her Gypsy Caravan range of fabrics, which are my favourite. Lovely pinks, greens, cornflower blues and touches of chocolate and raspberry. Any way the quilt just grew. I am really liking the old style quilts at the moment, especially depression and 1930′s quilts, but not so much on the colours. I like using the last scrap of a favourite fabric no matter how small.

So I decided to just start making blocks, around 8inch or so. I then added sashing to each block bringing them all up to the same size of 12inch.

I made sure I still had lots of little pieces of chenille for Olivia to play with, but I hope she loves the colours. To me they are a lovely combination. I have a couple of borders to put on yet and I really want to do some hand quilting in pearl cotton.

I also want to thank my wonderful friend Julian for helping sort out my imaging uploading problem. He is a genius friend of mine, who helps me when my skills just don’t cut the mustard. Woo Hoo for Julian!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 9:48 am and is filed under Patterns, Quilts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.