A new bed quilt

The terrible cold weather, even in Cornwall, has continued so no gardening and almost no walking.  It is good to look at this month's photo on the calendar and realise that some places are hot!

This is sunset at Changi beach, Singapore.  Changi beach is next to the airport and it is a very noisy place but popular with the locals who go there for picnics, taking their dogs, small tents to shelter from the hear and sun and even their cats on leads!  And most of them travel there by bus so I don't know how they carry everything.

Back in England I have got hooked into making a new quilt for my bed.  First I finished the quilt for the Alzheimers charity which enabled me to try out the block design I had chosen.

Not one of my best efforts I am afraid.  With hindsight I don't think glueing it was a good idea.  The quilting has puckered badly but then I realised that there might be something wrong with my walking foot.  This foot is twelve years old and has worked very hard.  I tend to think things will last for ever so I tried it out over various thicknesses of fabric and it was not 'walking' properly even when it was just two or three pieces of cotton rather than a proper sandwich.  This morning I was speaking to a professional longarm quilter and she said they could 'go'.  Fortunately it was not a disaster as my small Bernina came with a walking foot and I found that it fitted the old machine perfectly.  So this quilt is now finished and ready to be sent off.

As I said in my last posting I decided the best way to tackle a large kingsize quilt was to use precut fabric.  Here it is:

I bought the fabric from Kaleidescope www.kalquilts.com as I love their range of batiks.  It is quite difficult choosing this sort of thing from a website and the colours include rather a lot of purples for my taste.  Basically it is blackcurrant colours.

However there are also greens and turquoises and some of the pinks are lovely.  My husband HATES pink and for many years it was banned in this household!  I will have to buy some fabric for the border in due course so I shall probably try to find something in the blue/green range.  So far it appears that Hoffman makes up these packs from fabrics that don't then appear on suppliers' websites as yardage although the plain colours are generally there.

I have made 63 blocks and the sashing strips to go between them.  I am now stitching the sashing to the squares and am making good progress, having completed three and a half rows of nine squares.  I have to lay it out on the bed to see the whole thing as I do not have a design wall (a piece of foam) that is anywhere large enough for the whole thing so I probably won't have an idea of the whole thing for some time yet.  More pictures will follow soon.

This is not a cheap way of making a quilt.  Two sets of strips and two packs of ten inch squares cost over £100.  I have found a shop with a good range of extra wide quilt backs and sent off for samples for this quilt and another one that has been waiting for over a year to be sent to the longarm quilter.  I am going to send both quilts by Parcelforce as the quilter is at the other end of Cornwall and it is really too far to drive twice (two hours each way).  It will be strange to have new quilts on the beds but I am doing a major refurbishment of my bedroom and this quilt will probably last me out!