Vol 2 - Project 4 - Irish Garden (Milly's Quilt)

This is the alternate version of the previous quilt.  It's the same design, but smaller and the setting triangles are in a contrasting colour.  Here is Carrie Hargrave's version.....

I almost didn't make this one, because it's pretty much identical to the previous one.  As it turned out I'm glad I did as I learned something really important, which I'll explain later.  Also, as this top is quite small and I wanted to use the pink/blue colourway I'd played with on the previous quilt, I thought this may be a nice little quilt to make for my new granddaughter - who is yet to be born!  Amelia (who I promptly nicknamed Milly) is due to be born on September 10 (that's in a couple of weeks) and if she turns out to be a boy, um, I hope he likes pink!  The smaller size will be perfect in a pram or on the floor or to throw over a bouncinette or just to cuddle in.

FABRICS

I decided to play safe with the colour choices for this top, using a selection of coordinated fabrics from the one range - Chelsea Lace from Studio E - plus I added a white waffle weave cotton.

Ok, so it's not your average fabric selection for a baby quilt, but I don't have pink girly fabrics in my stash and I really love this design.  Yes it has lots of black but it does have butterflies and flowers (of sorts).  Hmmm......so when she's older I'll  make her a girly type one, with fairies or ballerinas, but for now, its pink and black Nouveau.

LEARNING A THING OR TWO

There are no separate instructions for this quilt so you need to count the blocks and make the fabric adjustments yourself.  For some reason I made just the right amount of rail fence blocks but made too many nine patches.....had a senior moment I guess.

Note to self - when making nine patches, use solids, tonals or tiny repeat prints.  Yes, I did it again - made the quilt top too busy looking by using the large print in the nine patch blocks.  Sigh. 

Pretty fabric in a large piece, but looks very different in 1 inch squares!

Originally I made the top square, as per the instructions, but decided to make it longer (using up those extra nine patches), thinking a rectangular quilt will be more practical than a square one.

Square layout

Rectangle layout

As I was stitching the rows together, I discovered something interesting............ check this out.

That triangle doesn't fit.   I unpicked, re-stitched and bingo........ all nice and as it should be.

The triangle was the correct size but must have been turned wrong.  As I was sorting out this little problem, I realised, with much embarrassment, that the previous 2 quilts both have the side setting triangle turned the wrong way. 

Now I thought there was something 'not quite right' with these quilts when I went to trim them up for the borders, but couldn't figure out what it was.  Basically, there was nothing to trim, the points from the blocks almost touched the edge of the row of triangles.  Not explained well, but a picture speaks etc etc.....

This is at the layout stage, and I hadn't twigged that something was wrong.

There's no border on Bryce's quilt but I had a hard time trying to trim the edges without removing the points of the blocks.

And again - the triangles only just fit.  As it's the same as the last one, I simply thought that's how it's done.

Metro Main Street had borders , but as there was no seam allowance  I had to sew over the points.

So this time, I was able to trim using the method from the book - measuring from the point, drawing a trimming line then slicing a nice neat edge.  All was well until I got to the corner triangles. 

Trimming the triangles

It's lucky I wanted to trim the edges to the exact size of the corners (otherwise there could've been tears!)

Don't you think these look a tad too small? I'm pretty sure they've been cut according to the size in the instructions but .....????? I had the same problem with the previous quilts. Maybe with the next one I'll be able to sort out what I'm doing wrong here.  Harriet?

FINISHING

I added 2 borders, but nearly stopped at one.  I really liked the look of the narrow blue/black border - it framed the top nicely. 

But there was still the problematic fabric in the nine patches - I needed to use the same fabric in the border simply to make sense of it all.

All finished.  I'm planning to quilt it with butterflies of course!

Now that I mention quilting, I think it's time to quilt up all the tops so far.  Apart from this one, they're all sandwiched, ditch stitched, and ready to go - except for the marking.  As I'll be using stencils, I'll ponce them as I quilt.