The Patchwork Quilt: how it all began...

As I mentioned the other day, this patchwork quilt has been a fairly long-term project. It all began a few months ago when I thought it would be nice to have a light quilt that we could use to throw over our seen-better-days sofa throughout the summer, and that would look equally nice thrown over the end of the bed in winter, over another attempt I made at a duvet cover about three years ago (below).

 
Well, it feels like winter is fast approaching and the patchwork quilt is finally nearly finished!

I started by cutting out hundreds of little squares using a 10cm by 10cm paper template. When I had arranged them into some sort of pattern-like order on the floor of the living room about a thousand times I finally came up with a diagonal symmetrical design I liked with red as the predominent colour (to match the minimal colour scheme in the bedroom).

With the rows laid out on the floor I began the ardous task of collecting them up in the order they were to be sewn together and numbering each pile with little post-its so there was  absolutely no confusion about which little square was going where.

Feeling confident about the order of each row I began pinning each square together face to face and stitching them...

...into long strips as above.

When I had all the strips needed to go across the width of the quilt I trimmed off the excess thread hanging from each seam and ironed the backs of the seams so that the small amount of material on the back of each seam was flat to the main body of material.

I then pinned each strip to the next, face to face, and sewed them together row by row...

...until I ended up with this.

I'm not bothered at all by the squares not lining up exactly, it won't spoil the overall effect of the quilt and unless you've measured the exact size of each patch, and the exact width of each seam, you're bound to end up with a little homemade giveaway in the slight overlap of some of the patches!

TO BE CONTINUED...