I spent a lot of my working at home days during my pregnancy sleeping – that was one thing I hadn’t really anticipated! I’m not going to lie, I lost a bit of enthusiasm for crafting and my blog which was a bit disheartening after all the effort I had been putting in to it. But in the last few weeks I regained my crafting mojo and was able to complete a few projects for Little One. The fabric buying ban was still in place (and still is, actually!) so I raided my stash for all the plain colours I have. So these are a mixture of mainly Kona cottons, Moda solids and a few other random ones I had. There are 21 colours altogether, and I used 3 squares of each – Tom helped me to work out how to lay them out so they were ‘random’, and I’m really pleased with how it turned out. It reminds me of Elmer the Patchwork Elephant! The backing fabric (pictured above) is ‘Mother Goose’ by Windham fabrics and it’s just gorgeous – I got it from Fabric Rehab with a birthday voucher (which certainly does not break the fabric buying ban haha!). As soon as I saw it, I knew I had to get it for this quilt.

I ended up with extra backing fabric and my Mum suggested making a cushion for tummy time – I found a tutorial online and it has turned out really well. I made some spare covers for it, which is why you’re probably thinking ‘but the one in the photo has cats on it!’ I’m going to do a separate review post about that pattern, so look out for that at some unspecified point in the future…!

I also managed to make some curtains for the nursery, using fabric from the duvet covers I had when I was younger. I loved them so much that I couldn’t part with them! It’s really nice to have been able to use them to make something for Little One.

Our nursery is quite small, so we kept everything white and decided to add lots of colour. My Dad very kindly came to re-wallpaper the room, and Tom did the painting. I think he’s all DIY-ed out now! Here are a few more pictures:

The piano stool has been useful in the nursery (added storage = bonus!), but I didn’t get the chance to paint it before Little One arrived. Something to add to the list of things I’d like to get around to at some point…

We are big fans of The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Dr. Seuss My Mum picked up these cute bookends in the charity shop she works in. They’re fab!

This mini wooden seaside was a gift from Grandma H and Grandad K – we call it Maryport in a tin (that’s what it came in). We spent quite a bit of time there as a family, so it’s lovely to have this in the nursery. Little One likes to look at it now that she can focus in on things a bit more. It’s a good job that crabs and seagulls aren’t this big in real life – not to scale here!

The lovely prints on the wall are from Miri Studio. We wanted to have some pictures in the nursery, and had a couple of these frames from Ikea already. Katy from Miri Studio makes them to fit these frames, so they were perfect! And it’s good to support artists from the UK. I love them all, but the cheeky squirrel is my favourite!

I can’t tell you how long it has taken me to put this post together! A big thank you to Tom for the gift of time to be able to do it I’ll be returning the favour so he can do some composing! He has taken some extended leave thanks to shared parental leave, and it has just been wonderful having him around. Time is going so fast and it’s brilliant that he can be around to be with us. I can’t imagine what it would have been like if he had gone back to work after only two weeks – I have a lot of respect for everyone who does that. We’ve been able to muddle through the fog of the first few weeks together, and it’s so nice to be emerging from it and to be able to do a few more normal things. I’ve been getting back in to Instagram too, as well as posting a few things on my Facebook page, so you can pop over there to see more in between my blog posts if you like. It feels good to be back!

(I love this picture! It took a while to get it, but I got it! )

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I matched the guitar colours with Kona cottons (it’s always good to have a reason to get the colour card out!), and it goes with Kona Jamaica (blue), Persimmon (orange), Lipstick (red), Pear (green) and Corn Yellow. I decided to use a dark blue binding to match (this was pre-made).

To make this quilt, you can follow my instructions from my first quilt (click here). I cut 7″ squares, but only used a 5 x 5 pattern to make a square quilt this time. It made sense to do that really, especially as I jut used solids for the patchwork. At first I modelled the layout on my first quilt, but I thought that the colours wanted to be a bit more random than that (although Tom has since pointed out to me that it can’t be random if I planned it…!). So this is the randomly-planned layout:

I’ll definitely be using this layout again – I’ve got one of each colour in each row, which is quite satisfying! I stitched the squares together, and then layered up the quilt. After my first two attempts at quilting, I used a different wadding this time – I went for two layers of Simply Cotton (pre-washed before quilting). It’s so much easier to quilt with, and I’m much happier with it overall so will definitely be using this and nothing else in future! Here’s the back – I kept the quilting simple by quilting in the ditch, which means that the pattern still shows through nicely:

I really must learn from my issues with binding though – after my first two quilts, I told myself that I must stitch the front on the machine and then hand stitch the back. Did I do this? Nope! So a few bits are a little untidy…let this be my reminder for the next one!

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We had a cup of tea and something to eat before we looked around – we wanted to make sure that we had the stamina! And also the showground was filling up, so we thought that this was a good plan before the queues got too big. Then we had a good potter around the stalls, and it was really difficult to know where to start! There were so many gorgeous things there, but one of my favourite stalls was Colouricious. They have the most beautiful hand carved wooden stamps, and they were doing some demonstrations of how you can stamp with paint and decolourant and used mixed media for different projects. I bought a set of blocks for printing and some decolourant too – can’t wait to have a go! My favourite stamp is this one – as you know, I just love owls!

Another lovely stall that we found was Farne Designs – they print beautiful textiles in Cornwall. We both bought a little selection of fabrics, and I got an embroidery kit for Mum for Christmas. Their stall was just so inviting – look at these fabrics!

One of the things that I was most excited about was meeting Stuart Hillard from the Great British Sewing Bee! For those of you who don’t know this programme, it has got so many people into sewing and making clothes and Stuart appeared on the first series. He was at the quilt show to sign his new book, and Mum has very kindly bought me it for Christmas so it will be fab to have a signed copy! Stuart was so lovely – he chatted to us like he had known us for years and was so welcoming. It really was a pleasure to meet him!

After we had spent up, we looked around the exhibition quilts. I can’t begin to tell you how inspiring they were – all the quilters are so incredibly talented, and the attention to detail is amazing. I love that people had incorporated different techniques into their quilts (including felting – look out for the planets quilt in my gallery below) and there were so many different styles. I went away with so many ideas, although I’m nowhere near good enough to create anything like these! The first quilt here won the ‘Best in Show’ and was by Liz Villalobos from Newcastle (quilted by Kay Bell) – simply stunning! I tried my best to take photos of all the labels so that I could credit all the quilters here, but I did miss one or tow (sorry). Click on the photos to see the quilter’s details.[/vc_column_text][vc_gallery type=”image_grid” onclick=”link_image” custom_links_target=”_self” grayscale=”no” choose_frame=”default” interval=”3″ images=”5720,5721,5722,5724,5723,5728,5725,5726,5733,5729,5738,5730,5731,5737″ img_size=”large” column_number=”2″][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1412354012241{padding-top: 30px !important;}”]Very inspiring, I’m sure you’ll agree! We left talking about all of the lovely things we’d like to be able to do with quilting one day… On the way home we met a lovely lady called Jennie at Harrogate station – she had also been to the show and had picked up some supplies for Christmas! Jennie has a Facebook page, so do pop over and say hello! Making a new friend was certainly a great end to the day! :-)[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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I decided to use a selection of plains in dark and light shades for the front, with some more of the amazing cat fabric on the back. All of that would be tied together with thin black and white striped binding:

I decide to cut 6 inch squares, and worked out how many I needed of each shade. I love the colours so I did play around with them once I had cut them out, like this:

After I’d finished taking photos, I then laid out the pieces on the floor, playing around with placement a little.

Now for the assembly! I was glad that I took a photo of the placement – to be honest, I would have just got so confused about without it. Although I did sew a couple the wrong way – there’s hardly ever a project I make without any unpicking! I started by sewing the triangles of the same colour together before pressing and trimming the corners. Our duet piano stool came in very handy at this point for keeping the squares in row order!

I then laid each one on the floor again before working out which squares to sew together. At first I (foolishly) went along a line from left to right, which was absolutely fine until I joined two rows together, and the rows had gone out of synch. So that’s where the unpicking came in… I realised that the easiest way was to work in two blocks of 4 squares and a block of 6, which could then be joined together. This is what I did on the first quilt I made, so why I felt the need to switch to a different, untested method I have no idea! At least I know now that my system works for me I pressed the seams at each point of sewing blocks together, so that the whole thing would lay flat.

It took a long time to put the patchwork together, but I was so pleased with how it turned out! Yes, there are a few wonky bits, but you have to look closely to see them I think, and the overall effect is just what I wanted. The next step always makes me a bit nervous once I’m happy with the patchwork – I don’t want to make a mess with the quilting!

To quilt I did what I now know is called quilting ‘in the ditch’, which is basically where you sew along the seams. I just did this on the straight lines (i.e. not the diagonals) using white thread. On the odd occasion the lines weren’t quite matching, so I just had to stop to tie the ends and line it all up again! I’m not sure if you need to use a special foot for this really, but because it wasn’t too thick and I was just sewing straight lines, I just used my normal foot.

Thankfully, other than a few minor slips, I did ok! I only just had enough wadding and backing fabric here, and in one corner the backing had moved up a little whilst sewing, so I’d need to make sure that the binding would cover it. I made my own binding from this super black and white stripes fabric, which contrasts so well with the bright, bold colours. I cut 2 inch strips and then pressed back about half a centimetre on each side. I know I’m mixing up my imperial and metric here, but that’s how I roll! I machine stitched the binding to the front of the quilt and then hand stitched the back – this bit was done with the help of a few episodes of Murder, She Wrote which is a guilty pleasure of mine…don’t judge me!

I must admit that I still don’t really know how to finish off corners…if anyone has any tips, they would be gratefully received! I’m pleased that I managed to make these ones look neat though. And I also made a label to mark the occasion for the bottom corner.

Hopefully Baby will be really happy playing on their mat, with as many friends as can fit on it!

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I’ve been wanting to make a quilt for so long now – I follow so many people on Instagram who are brilliant quilters, and Tom’s Aunt makes amazing ones too so I’m surrounded by inspiration! Our dear friends Luci and Simon are expecting their first baby in just a few weeks, so I decided that I’d have a go at making them a special quilt. They chose not to find out what they are having so I wasn’t sure if they were going for a particular colour scheme – so I decided to go for all the colours!

I had a look around for a basic square quilt tutorial online, but couldn’t really find exactly what I wanted. I guess that this is probably because this is one of the simplest quilts you can ever make, so most people don’t actually need to learn how to do it! There are some beautiful quilt blocks out there, and I loved so many of them but I wanted to make mine with simple squares – partly because I was running out of time to get it done, but also because I had seen the funky zebra and cat fabrics and I wanted to have fairly large squares of them to show off the pattern.

I started by collecting my fabrics and buying a few new quilting materials, so I now have a rotary cutter and a big cutting mat, as well as a handy ruler thingy. I didn’t realise how useful rotary cutters are – this has definitely revolutionised my crafting! In terms of fabrics, I chose a mixture of plain cotton solids and some funky patterns in matching colours. I didn’t want it to be all pattern, so the solids help to break it up a bit. I decided to use 7 x 7″ squares with a 1/2″ seam allowance, in a grid 5 squares across and 6 squares down. After drawing out my plan, I worked out that I needed 3 plain squares in each of the 6 colours, and 2 of each of the patterned fabrics. Then I got cutting!

When all the squares were cut, I laid them all out on our living room floor – this meant that I could work out where to pin them together before stitching.

I stitched the squares together so that I had 3 groups of 4 squares joined together, and 3 groups of 6. Then I joined each of those groups together.

Ta-dah! Once all the fabric was joined together, I cut out a piece of wadding and some red and white stripey cotton fabric the same size for the backing. I pinned it all together using some quilting pins and then started sewing each square.

I decided to sew each square with matching colour thread (which did mean a lot of changing bobbins!) and stitched about 1/2″ inside each seam. At first I was worried that the squares were a bit poofy, but the more I stitched the better it seemed – and it needs to be comfy for baby! I was also a bit bothered about the fact that my squares on the back didn’t line up with the lines of the fabric, but this also looked better the more I went on.

The final stage is to sew on the binding. I was going to make it myself, but bought some in the end because I was running out of time to finish my quilt! This was a bit tricky and I should probably look up a better way to do it (any suggestions would be gratefully received!). I stitched on the machine but finished a few bits off by hand.

I added a final final touch with this label, which I wrote with a permanent quilting marker pen. I just used some plain white cotton for this, and pressed the edges behind before hand stitching on with some blue cotton to match the binding.

I’m really pleased with how my first quilt has turned out! I’ve learnt a lot from doing it (mainly realising what I need to look into a bit more) and am looking forward to making my next one! Hope you’ve all had a super weekend

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