Beautiful Emily Jayne Millar was born on 2nd May at 18.37, 8lbs 7oz. She is the daughter of my oldest bestest friend Gareth and so I had decided a while back (as you may remember) to make her a quilt, only I didn’t know it was a ‘her’ at the time!

As this was going to take a while I decided to get the basic quilt finished and then add the monogram and do the actual quilting once the baby was born. I bought a gorgeous fat quarter pack in cute prints which were unisex enough to work either way from www.quilterscloth.co.uk, they don’t have it any more but they have a really good selection of kid and baby print fabrics, I still have at least half of it left over so I might make another elephant from it.

I did the main bit of the quilt in a weekend, I cut the pieces on the Friday night, sewed them together on the Saturday, and then put it all together on the Sunday. I have done this entirely on the machine which makes a massive difference, it really speeds up the piecing and makes it all nice and neat too, I’ve made it quite big so she can grow into it and use it as a quilt, play mat etc.

So having got a baby, and by extension a name, for this quilt, I made the letter ‘E’ and I realised I was going to have to sew it on by hand so the stitching didn’t show through on the other side, I ironed on some fusible interfacing and zig zagged the edges and carefully sewed it on, then on with the quilting.

This takes a LONG time, even on the machine, I didn’t want to mark the fabric so I pinned the lines of the quilt and tried to follow it by eye, I’m so so pleased with how it turned out, it’s really neat and pretty.

I hope she likes it, I am expecting photos from Gareth, unless she hates it and throws up on it, I’m aware that these things can be mutually exclusive in the case of a baby.

I thought you might like to see where I’m getting with my patchwork quilt having not heard about it since May, you could be forgiven for thinking I had quietly let it slip away into the graveyard of unfinished projects. But no! I have been steadily ploughing on with it, albeit somewhat sporadically, and have now completed 5 (and a half) squares.

I have re-re-calculated and I think I’ll need at least 15 squares to make a decent size quilt so realistically I am a long way off finishing it. Even once I finish the patchwork i then have to sew it all together, sew together the padding and lining, do the actual quilting, sew on the backing fabric and bias bind the edges.

I finished my second square!

And have cut and tacked my third:

However, I realised (well Simon did some calculations) that I don’t actually have enough fabric for the size quilt I want so I have ordered the same amount again drom the lovely woman and Dungarees and Daisies. I think I will need about 12 squares in total with some navy fabric in between each one in strips so it should be the perfect size for snuggling under on the sofa come the winter – assuming I keep up with it it should be ready by then.

Oh my god, I am OBSESSED with patchwork, it’s so fun! I Started my first square last weekend and have completed it today.

Now check out the process:

Okay so for my birthday my lovely grandmother, Georgie, gave me a family heirloom, a quilter’s geometric ruler. Still got the packaging and everything!

Georgie is a Master of Patchwork and I’ve been meaning to give it a go for ages so I decided to buy some fabric, I spent ages agonising over the gorgeous and hugely expensive designer fabrics on etsy but in the end decided I didn’t need to spend loads of money to make something beautiful.

So I bought some fabric from this great shop on ebay, Dungarees and Daisies which arrived today – how exciting! Really reasonable prices and postage. I also need some plain, maybe navy or black fabric to break up the reds I think.

There are loads of free patterns online and some good and some bad ones on Amy Butler’s website (also free) but I have a template kit for a Queen Charlotte’s Crown design  that came out of the bottom of my mum’s craft pit so I think I’ll give that a go – am I being too ambitious? I can just never bring myself to do the shit boring things first. With any new craft I want to do the complicated pretty designs, so it ends up with a lot of swearing and unpicking BUT it’s worth it, and I think I learn quicker that way…

Anyway this is another project that I plan to do a bit of every evening so I’ll post some more pictures when I have a decent pattern drawn up and some sizeable peices sewn together.