Monday 7 May 2012

Tumbling

A little while ago, I decided that the 'I've run out of pregnant friends' gap would be a good oppurtunity to try out making a doll quilt. I was inspired by this post on Crazy Mom Quilts: she has such good ideas! Picking out fabrics was a little tricky: I wanted to use fabric I already owned, but when I picked out all the girly fabrics they looked rather sickly-sweet together. So instead I went for a mix of pink, blue and white:


I absolutely love the pink fabric. It's from the Nicey Jane collection by Heather Bailey. It was bought to become part of a picnic-rug-quilt I was planning to make and keep which hasn't quite happened yet (maybe one day!). The other fabrics are completely different: the blue is part of a duvet cover from Oxfam and the white is from the local cheap fabric shop. Gotta love the variety :)


I decided to try out this tutorial and make a 'tumbler' quilt. The mathematician in me (I studied maths at uni) rebelled against the template idea: surely geometry would produce more accurate tumblers? So instead I did a few calculations and used the gridlines on the mat to get the correct angles. Much better. Although quite a slow process; not sure yet whether my perfectionism is going to turn out to be a blessing or a curse with quilting!

This was my first quilt with non-right-angled patchwork and it was tricky to piece. When piecing the tumblers you had to judge 1/4 inch distances by eye. Not my strong point. But I persevered, and I'm so glad I did. I had to re-do about two or three of the joins per row (perfectionism strikes again...) but eventually got them all about right and I love the result.



the post-it note was a reminder that the tumbler needed re-doing when I could face it!

The above photo proved to be very helpful later on: when it came to sewing the rows together I got the first seam wrong (I sewed the top of row 1 to the bottom of row 2) and then couldn't get the pattern to work. My husband Laurence and I spent a long time staring at the blocks while I tried to figure out if I really was silly enough to have created a set which didn't fit together. Eventually figured out my mistake using the photo, unpicked and resewed and it all came together to look like this!


Ta-dah! One complete quilt top. Tune in again soon to see the fun I had with the back of this quilt :)

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