A Finish But Not The One Scheduled

I have a finish.

I have two finishes in the one week. Incredible. My plan was to blog my finished Circles quilt but best laid plans of mice and men etc etc. This morning we woke up to a winter wonderland. This would have been lovely to take photos of the circle quilt, but honey it was cold outside. We were also invited out for lunch with friends and by the time we de-iced the cars and got organised it was time to go. You see, here in the UK we don't get a lot of snow. We get a few heavy days of snow a year, and so when it does snow, the country comes to a stop. Our infrastructure isn't really built to cope with it. Rain yes, snow no. Our cars go slippy sliddy all over the place and people can talk of nothing else.

Our friends live in the countryside, we would have got some lovely Circle photos draped in the snow over a field gate. I don't like to be a diva though. It was time to spend with friends, eating and chatting, which we did.

And so we have finish no 2. My Liberty triangles quilt. This quilt was inspired by the Prism Liberty quilt in Purl SoHo, NYC. I had admired this quilt on the website, and when I saw it in the actual shop, I still loved it. I have had it in mind for ages. And then two weeks ago I decided to go for it.

I say inspired by Purl SoHo, in that I looked at their quilt and then just went ahead and made it. I used 5" squares of white Kona with a 3" square of  Liberty fabric pinned to the top right hand corner. I drew a line from one corner of the Liberty to the other. Sewed along this line, flipped back and ironed, and trimmed off the excess. Quick and easy.

I had absolutely no formula as to what fabrics to use. My only criteria were I used floral Liberty fabrics, and the small scale prints as much as possible. A couple of bigger scale prints sneaked in to make up the numbers. I have various other Liberty prints in paisley or dark colours, but didn't use them. And then I just sewed all the 5" squares together. 8 blocks per row. 8 rows. 64 blocks in total. I decided not to stress by graduating the colours, it was totally random. There only forethought was that two blocks the same didn't become neighbours.

You may remember that I decided to take the plunge and use my Liberty for the backing too. There is no point in keeping stuff for "good". You are a long time dead, use it and enjoy it and when it is done it is done. Or so I have decided. I have had this fabric for about 3 years and treasured it and stroked it often. In fact I had looked after it so well, I had "borrowed" fabric from two opposing corners, which caused a problem when I laid out the backing. Grr.  A little frankensteining and all was well with the world.

After the freefall that was the quilting in the Circles quilt, I went back to my favourite. ~Three lines of quilting per seam on the vertical. And just to be different, three vertical lines of quilting on the  horizontal seams. One in the seam and another a foot width each side of the seam. Easy and no threads to spend precious evenings sewing in.

Now the binding. I really wanted to use my green spotty Rose and Hubble fabric.

Although my grandson, the w'ain, will use this, I was keen not to use blue binding. I didn't want to mark this out as a boy's quilt. Who am I kidding with all these florals?  This is just a quilt in Granny's house, neither specifically for a boy or girl. Just one problem. The green was all wrong. I thought the green might be refreshing, contemporary but it was just wrong. What this quilt really needed was a pastel blue binding, so a pastel blue binding it has.

 It just sets off the gentle florals, and I am very happy with it.

I love this wee quilt. My husband loves this wee quilt. My daughter loves this wee quilt. I hope my grandson loves it too. At the moment it is pristine, whiter than white. Nothing like a pristine white quilt to make your white leather chairs look grubby. Maybe I will frame it!

Magnus is looking after the quilt in the meantime.

 The daughter wanted a bear that was bigger than herself, some 25 years ago now. Granda, who didn't do shopping, went shopping. The shopping gods were with him, as in the shop owned by Mr Marks & Mr Spencer, there was a whole display of big bears. And so Magnus joined our family, living mostly in the roof space these days, until he puts on his Santa hat and joins us for December.

Helen x
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