I attended a workshop lead by
Jenny Haynes quilter-extraordinaire at the Village Haberdashery in West Hampstead. They recently moved to a beautiful new building just opposite West Hampstead Underground Station which is flooded with light and lots of beautiful fabrics and craft supplies.
We were instructed to bring 0.25cm of four to five different coloured quilting weight cottons to create a improvisation quilt using contrasting fabrics. I already knew when I booked the course that the quilt I created in the workshop would be a baby quilt for my friend who is six months pregnant. I got prepared with some stealth research and found out what her and her partners favourite colours were; red, yellow, green and blue.
I was going to buy a selection of fabric for this course but a very surprizing and beautiful gift arrived from New York. My friend Kathy who I had met on the
Janet Bolton workshop in January had sent me the full range of beautiful fat quarters of their
current quilting cottons.
So I was set for the workshop. Jenny (in the photo above) showed us her beautiful chambray blues and yellow improvisation quilt and showed us a variety of quilting images to get inspired by. Jenny was a very encouraging tutor with lots of great ideas and little tips to help you along the way. Each workshop attendee (Sue, Sirini and myself) were all making different things and Jenny was great at helping each of us out with our projects.
The design of my quilt was inspired by a quilt that was made up of contrasting colours in small blocks. I spent about fifteen minutes exploring pairs of colours using the beautiful Andover fabrics that Kathy had gifted me.
I cut 10cm strips off the ends of the fat quarters and sewed the contrasting pairs together which were then cut into four sections.
The next step was to sew these collections of fabrics together into strips of eight. I then started to block out the order of the quilt by pinning it onto the very useful pin-wall by the side of the workshop tables. You can see the journey of the quilt below.
After sewing each section I ironed the seams, always ironing the lighter coloured fabric towards the darker coloured fabric. I then sewed long strips together across the quilt and finally sewed each strip to each other and the outcome was this:
When I got home I pinned the top-quilt and sandwiched the wadding between the backing fabric. I then hand-basted the quilt sewing from the centre outwards across the whole quilt to secure all three layers together. Sewing the hand-basting from the centre outwards keeps the layers even and avoids any ripples and shifts in the fabric sandwich!
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| You can see the dark threads of the hand-basting here |
Next the slow and steady job of hand-quilting the fabric begins. The due date of my friends baby is in June so I have a decent amount of time to get this completed in good time. I will blog about the finished quilt in a month or so!
