My first quilt

A few years ago, when I was twenty, my mum wanted to go to a patchwork class but couldn't drive in the dark so asked me to take her.  It was a fair drive away and rather than hang around waiting for her to finish I decided to join the class too.  The tutor told us that patchwork was like a puzzle.  You put two triangles together and they made a square.  You put two rectangles together and they made a square.  If you sew all these rectangles, triangles and squares together you get a large square.  It was captivating!  We were shown how to make our own templates out of cereal packets and off we went to do our first block at home.  

I remember I had raided my mum's furnishing fabric stash and made my first block out of the most ghastly brown and orange fabric which I then turned into a cushion.  But it was after making that one block I had the dawning realisation that if I can make one block I can make two...then more!  I purchased the blue fabric because it was on sale and bought the pink and cream chinz to go with it and I made twenty five blocks.  I drew around the cereal packet templates with biro and by the end of my block making the cardboard edges were soggy and bent and useless.  It didn't occur to me to make fresh new templates!

It was at this point that I decided that because I could make 25 blocks that patchwork was easy peasy and we no longer needed to go to the class.  Ahem.

Well then it was time to add sashings and borders.  I'll be brief and just say that not a lot of measuring went into the sewing of either of these things and there is not one single 1/4 inch seam allowance as you can see from this picture.  Go on, I dare you to click on it to enlarge it!

After that it was time to quilt.  My fluffy polyester wadding packet informed me that I had to quilt quite densely so my plan was to quilt around every triangle.  Stab, stab, stab went my needle and the stitches looked rather amazing!  On the front that is.  They were horrendous on the backing!  And quilting was soooo boring!  Needless to say I quilted around a few triangles and called it a day.  I decided the horrible quilting on the back needed to be covered up so I added another backing.  I didn't know what binding was back then so I "bagged" the quilt to finish it.

And fair play, that quilt was on my bed, except for when it was being washed, for over twenty years.  The quilting held, surprisingly, but the edges had started to fray and come apart and the fluffy polyester wadding was flat and stiff.  It needed a new lease of life!  So I unpicked all that quilting (which didn't take very long!) and gazed in horror at the inside of my quilt.  How I managed to get it even resembling a quilt I have no idea!  But I had a good laugh over my young adult know it all self!  I had hoped to just quilt the top at that point but I needed it to be square for the quilting frame and so I had to redo the sashings and borders.  I measured them this time!  

After quilting and adding binding it was done.  Here it is back on my bed.  I'm very happy!