Elegant Floral Lap Quilt
This quilt ended up being 52.5 inches x 52.5 inches, so
it’s a lovely lap size quilt. I gave this to an old friend of mine at her baby
shower. So she can use it for bub, or for herself.
The inner square of this quilt were pre-cut and sold as a
pack which I obtained from Lincraft Toombul. There were no instructions so I
laid the squares out to get a feel for how I wanted the quilt to look. Due to
lack of space at the time I ended up laying out the quilt on my bed!
Again the edges of the squares were cut with the zigzagged edges. Still not a fan, as this can be very hard to line up and have everything look straight when sewing. However it saved me having to cut up fabric, which can feel like it’s taking forever when I’m itching to sew. So I’m learning to just go with it. Besides, when I saw the fabric squares I just HAD to buy them…they were too pretty!
I sewed the squares together in a strip first. While
leaving the remaining quilt squares laid out in the pattern that I wanted to
make. Then as I’d sewn each strip I replaced the strip to the unsewn pattern
laid out on my bed, so as to make sure that I didn’t get any squares out of
order.
As usual sewing for an hour or two can feel like five
minutes, so I ended up having to pack away all of my sewn up strips. I didn’t
want any to get out of order, so I’ve laid them carefully over a chair (this is
so I could try to take up the project again when I had some more spare time). And also as I HATE ironing!!! So it was my
hope that I wouldn’t need to re-iron everything all over again when I did get a
chance to get back to it. I pretty much only iron when I’m quilting to ensure
everything ends up being straight, or if I happen to have some epic event that
I need to attend.
After sewing the central squares together I decided that I wanted to make the quilt at least the size of a lap quilt. So I rummaged through some of my scrap fabrics to see if I had anything that would suit the style of the quilt and to make sure that I had enough fabric before heading off to buy some more. Luckily I had a lovely print which I had plenty of to add some classy edging borders to the quilt. The border edges are roughly 6.5 inches.
The backing is a mustard coloured geometric circle print,
which I felt could tie in with the binding fabric. Originally I searched high
and low for a green fabric for the binding. However I just couldn’t find
anything that I really liked, that I felt would suit this quilt. The prints in
them were either too big or too small, or just didn’t feel right.
I ended up using a brown printed fabric that I had
actually gotten with another project in mind. So since I laid it next to the
quilt top and the backing fabric and it seemed to be the only thing that I
could find that tied it all together… I went with it.
I quilted the quilt by making straight lines on either
side of the strips seams. Which was a little tricky, as due to the way the
squares were cut; not everything lines up 100%. That said I think that I did a
pretty good job. This was the first quilt that I quilted with straight lines,
and it was difficult not to have puckers (even though I had used a binding
spray and it was very well stuck together before I started quilting). For the quilting
threads I’ve used an off white coloured thread for the top and a golden/mustard
coloured thread for the backing so that it blends in.
Hopefully I’ll have time to blog about the other quilts I’m
making next month, however I’m flat out trying to find the time to sew!
