My first quilt, yeah!

If you remember we suffered a major blanket mayhem when we welcomed Luna, our crazy Jack Russell lady, in our home. We were ok during these past few months as we had an actual summer in Ireland. But temperature has dropped like 20 degrees overnight. And we now suffer from chilly knees when watching intellectually challenging television programmes at night. That’s why I put into motion the largest scale quilt making campaign ever known in this house. That is: I made one quilt.

It was meant to be a cheap and quick project, a taster to make sure I should engage into more challenging quilt designs. So this is basically made of a fleece blanket (shopped at Ikea) and some polycotton in sage. Now of course I screwed up my measurements and didn’t have enough fabric to cover the full blanket, let alone add binding. So this was also an over simplified version of a basic quilt: two rectangles stitched together with a layer of fleece in between the layers. I love how it turned out. Even if the padding is quite thin, the quilting itself gives it some thickness. It is soft and warm. I was also happy with the slightly contrasting thread I used for the quilting. Even so that I want to make more of those.

However I learned my first few quilting lessons:

• I now know from the bottom of my crushed soul why quilters add binding after quilting. With my set up I ended up with some creases where the fabric has slid. As the sides were not open they had no where to go, poor little things!
• Simple wavy quilting is nice. But I would have achieved a nicer look if I had drawn the pattern on the fabric beforehand. Because while you’re focussed on quilting you can’t step back to get the full picture and figure out if you need a bit more curvy wave here and there.
• Dog are evil. The blanket had been sitting on the sofa for a grand total of 20 minutes when I found Luna chewing on it! She’s now banned from the sofa. Most of the time at least. Anyone knowing of some dog repellent spray?

Good news is I found two or three blankets that will be perfect candidates for my future experimentations.