Thursday 16 October 2014

Murphy's quilt

I think I will name this quilt Murphy's quilt as in Murphy's Law - you know the one, everything that could go wrong will go wrong! This quilt has nearly been the death of me!



First the purples - most quilters will say if they are short on one colour it will be purple. I don't think that it is so much of a conscious choice rather than a lack of that shade available. It is so hard to get. If you go to the purples section on a fabric website it will show mostly that magenta pinky colour. I had really wanted a much darker truer purple. But in the end I settled for the mish mash of anything that remotely resembled purple. So I basically started a quilt, one of the few things I make to keep for myself, with a lot of fabrics I barely liked.



Then the pattern I chose way back when I first started quilting. I thought it looked so striking. However when I looked at the cutting, it was really wasteful if you weren't using a layer cake. So I reworked it so that I could cut with yardage. It still left a lot of crazy diagonal cuts and loads of half square triangles.



The sewing was basically 2 seams which I found it a bit boring and then there were no directions as to how to square up which meant if you didn't create your own system you could easily cut way off as each block is asymmetrical. So now I had a load of fabrics I didn't really like using a pattern that I didn't like making.





I got the quilt top finished and my husband thought I should really add an extra row to one side. But I had been sewing rows the other way and didn't really want to add it cross wise. So if you're keeping track we now have fabrics I don't like, a pattern not pleasant to sew and a quilt that is too small for the bed!



Next up comes the quilt sandwich. Easy, right? I had bought bamboo quilting especially for this project. But by the time I got round to this one I might have cut into it for something else. So I had all these large scraps and had to piece them together into a super king quilt! It took me about an hour to do the maths - and I am not kidding. Not that it really helped. I sewed bits to the wrong side and it was still just big enough...which wasn't enough when trying to square up the quilt sandwich. So some sides were over and some bits short.



It was even a nightmare to photograph with all the dark colours in it which is why it has taken me so long to blog about it.But at last it was done. Yay. We got it on our bed for a few weeks until the weather here got too cold and I begged for the duvet to go back on.


1 comment:

  1. A lot of trouble, but the quilt is so beautiful. I love it and I love your bedroom too! Congrats with the finish.
    Many happy dreams!

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