Patchwork Quilt: 1. A Kick Start

As we may have mentioned before, we both come from families full of creative people. When we got married Joe's mum started talking about making us a patchwork quilt. We love patchwork quilts and currently own four of them (one made by each of Jenny, Joe, Jenny's mum and Joe's mum). However these are all single quilts, and this time the offer was to make a double quilt. At around the time of our second wedding anniversary (the 'cotton' anniversary), the idea was brought up again and we looked at some patterns and chose some material, but the busyness of life took over. Too many things to do, too little time.

Our current quilt collection.

Getting close to our fourth wedding anniversary we decided it was time to act. A few weeks ago Joe and I made the drive to Hampshire, trusty sewing machine in tow, for a weekend of sewing to kick start this project.

It ended up being a slower start than we'd hoped for as we all scratched our heads over the complicated paper piecing idea that we'd not looked at for years. Each square is made up of four identical quarters, each of which is also made up of four smaller triangles. There isn't a nice angle in the lot of them and our first set of templates had printed slightly skew. We do like a challenge.

Once the templates were all sorted we ploughed in with enthusiasm and then tripped over again and again as we lots of made little discoveries. We realised that this design is fairly sensitive to the direction of the pattern on the material, and that if you cut out the pieces through multiple layers of fabric then you don't end up with four identical pieces - but with two correct pieces and two mirror images. I'm sure if we'd (read "I'd"!) been slightly less enthusiastic we'd have spotted these sooner - but hey ho. Stitch unpickers at the ready!

Finally we got into the swing of it though. With a rhythm of work between the cutter, the presser and the sewer we produced our first three squares.

We've split up the jobs to be done before we next meet to sew and the project was, at last, started.

Apologies for the lack of photos - we were far too absorbed in our sewing!