New Obsession

So I have branched away from just using my sewing machine for making clothes and have now finished my very first quilt! It took so long - even just finding all the fabrics to use took long enough! - and hasn't exactly turned out to be cheap but I am so happy with it. 

 I used the book Quilting In No Time as guidance, although I chose to use all patterned fabrics instead of half plain because I wasn't keen on how it looked on the one in the book:

Once I had FINALLY finished cutting out all my 15cm x 15cm fabric squares I arranged them in the order I wanted to sew them. I chose to make it a completely random order because I thought that would be most effective. It did take a lot of swapping to arrange it but it was totally worth it.

 I then sewed the squares into rows and then the rows together. I didn't make my seams quite as wide as recommended though which was then a bit of a problem when it came to getting the backing fabric. Because I had made the seams smaller the width of the quilt was a lot wider than the book had predicted it would be - 15cm wider in fact. This meant it was impossible to find a material wide enough to use as backing fabric. 

I was planning on using strips of material as binding anyway for the edges of my quilt, so I decided I would make the border on the back wider than that on the front, thereby adding more material to the back and solving the problem of it being too wide... Not as simple as it sounds though! The corners were so difficult and it took so many attempts to get them just right.

Next time I'm doing the seams properly and not making it so wide.

The finished item. Notice the matching cushion - definitely my favourite fabric.

Although this project was far harder work than I had thought it would be I'm definitely hooked. I've already got fabric for my next two...