Monday 8 February 2016

Quilt story - How some orphan blocks became a quilt top forSiblingsTogether



I received some orphan blocks some months back from my lovely friend and Bee a Brit Stingy beemate Catherine !




From early on I thought they would make a good border to a medallion quilt. I researched some complicated centre blocks but then I thought I should just keep it simple.   I made a quilt in my Siblings Together Bee out of this simple tile type block and I thought it would work here too.




As my donated blocks are orphans I don't have the fabrics these were made from so what could I use from my stash to make a quilt top?  I found what I had in the tones already used - they weren't an exact match but I find that a scrappy quilt is quite forgiving as long as you mix it up throughout the quilt.

Then I decided I wanted a colour that would bring a bit of a sparkle to the quilt!  I tried green but it wasn't working, then tried aqua, which seemed to bring that 'je ne said quoi'!






It was getting there but not big enough.

 When I asked for suggested borders on Instagram (nickyeglinton - if you want to find me) two were suggested : nine patches from Alison; and piano keys from Trudi !  So both went in the mix and I ended up with nine patch corner stones that echo my centre block and stripy piano key borders ...


I think I was right about that medallion style and my friends were right about those borders don't you? 



I just finished it off with a light orange plaid strip all the way round just to make it a smidge bigger and to tidy up all those stripy ends!   Less likely to stretch in ways I don't want it to.  

I was then kindly offered this fabric as backing for this quilt from  [IG account] @nantucks. [that macaroon bar has long gone by the way]




And then I quilted it and bound it in some leftover backing fabric.



This quilt is ready to be sent to Siblings Together.  Mission accomplished.

4 comments:

  1. What a great end result! It's great to see how this quilt evolved just from some orphan blocks. Someone is going to be getting a wonderful quilt.

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  2. This is lovely. I sometimes wonder whether the quilts that evolve like this are the best of all. After all I presume quilters in the past didn't have the luxury of coordinated fabric collections and just blended things together beautifully.

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  3. Great result, it looks lovely.

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