For my photo today, I thought it was time to introduce you to the famous quilt. Well, to its constituent parts anyway.
I think I’ve mentioned a few times before that I am working on (ahem, really, failing to work on) a quilt for my sister and her husband. It was to be their Christmas present last year. Except my old sewing machine broke a week before Christmas and I had barely even started sewing the pieces together.
Okay, no problem, I showed them what I had done, they loved it, and I thought it would take me a matter of weeks to finish.
Then I decided that it was too small. So I ordered more of the stunning V&A quilts fabric. (Sounds like a quick thing to do, doesn’t it? In fact, that part of the whole venture took me about four months…)
By this point, the old sewing machine had given up the ghost and I’d got a lovely spanking new sewing machine.
Should be easy from now on in. Except… I couldn’t for the life of me work out how to create the same seam allowance that I’d done on the old machine. (I’m slightly embarrassed to tell you this, but I’d decided that the perfect way to make the seam allowance I wanted on the old machine was to sew the whole thing with the needle aligned to the right. Which created a very unstandard seam allowance. Ah well, you sew, you learn.)
I’ve been pondering this problem now for, oooh, probably about another three months and have finally decided, what the heck, I’m not about to undo everything I’ve done and start again, so the new rows will just have to not fit perfectly with the old ones, and I’ll trim down the edges where I need to. I’m sure my sister would rather have imperfect quilt sometime before next Christmas, than a perfect one in a decade.
But since it just might take me a little while to get to the end result, in the meantime, I thought I’d just show you this picture of the beautiful fabrics I’m working with.
Related articles:
- Take a look at my pictures for each day this month: August break photos
- I gathered together a collection of tutorials for homemade Christmas presents last year, along with links to things that I actually did manage to make in time: homemade Christmas presents
Wolves in London 
These fabrics are lovely! :o) Don’t know if this will work for you – kind of depends on the design of the quilt so far but… could you take what you’ve done so far and make it the centre of a larger quilt by putting some sashing around it and then adding your new parts around that as a border? Hope that makes sense! That way you don’t have to worry about the old part having a different seam allowance. Oh, and do go and buy yourself a quarter inch quilter’s foot for that new machine… ;o)
That is an absolute genius idea! And I wish that I’d posted this here a week or so ago and got the genius idea then as I have already started sewing on all the non-matching rows, ha ha.
Yes, new machine seems to automatically have a 1/4 inch foot, which is making life a lot easier. Luckily, my sister doesn’t really sew or anything, so I think she’ll still appreciate the quilt even with all its flaws (am hoping she won’t really notice the flaws. Fingers crossed!)
Scrummy. Have you thought about sticking some tape on your base plate to align your fabric with, to get the same seam allowance?
Oh my goodness, another genius idea! If only I’d shared this problem before! I think I’ve got time to minimise the damage by doing this too. Thanks so much.
Share away – I’m sure I’ve made most of the mistakes already…
I have a quilt like this … started and languishing in a plastic bag in a basket under more fabric and craft supplies … maybe sometime this decade I will get it finished … I love your fabrics … looking forward to the big reveal … Bee xx
Ha ha, good to know I’m not the only one!