Two person quick quilt.

Last Thursday Robin decided to come up to the shop with me. He then was foolish enough to show an interest in a new range that had just arrived and before I knew what was happening he was making a sample up.

The quilt was done in a very leisurely six hours. with many distractions, well it did coincide with my Thursday night class. Most of the quilt is made from cheater fabric, which is why it is quick. It would be even faster if you weren't fiddling to try and get a perfect number of half square triangles on each side. The pattern that comes with the fabric is for a 3x3 center section, but we decided that was too big for a sample, so had to recalculate everything for the 2x2 size.

The only real patchwork in the quilt are the corner stones in the wide border, and if you are making up this pattern and you want the narrow green stripes in the border make sure you cut the squares half an inch bigger than the pattern say to. We added the outermost red border to help preserve the the green strips as well, we needed some where to attach the binding. The binding is really clever, it is made up of the half square triangle fabric you have left over. When you cut the strips for the inner border you can only use alternate rows as you need to leave a seam allowance, but the scrap is the perfect size to turn into binding. It looks really good too.

Friday I quilted it. I didn't enjoy the meander much, I never do but we like to use it on things like this as a lot of people can do it easily and it shows what it will look like the way they are most likely to choose. Personally I would rather have done tight 'Decadent swirls' but that is just me. In the half square triangles I got to try out a continuous curve pattern. It went pretty well for a first attempt, and inspired me to try a small cross hatching in the middle of the faux applique. It's a good effect and I suspect I will now use it again. Having a grid stencil does make it a lot easier.

The corner stones did stump me for a while but eventually I settled on continuing the border design with quilting. To do this I traced the leaves from the border fabric onto Golden Thread paper and added extra motifs as required. I then pinned the paper into position and stitched through it on the line I had drawn. It's a nice way of doing a fancy quilting patter with a fabric like this as there is no artistry required just trace things to fill the space. Each corner has a different design and I suspect if you don't know how it was done it would look pretty clever. The best part was that the design was simple enough to do as a continuous line on three of the corners.

If you would like to see it in person this quilt will be on display this Saturday at the Patchwork Corner Christmas Party.