The quilt that drove me crazy!

A commissioned quilt, my first one. Sounded good in theory, even though it involved t-shirts, baby clothes and school uniforms! 

In practice, this was probably the most difficult quilt I have ever made! The friend who ordered it (for her daughter) said she didn't mind about the style, but it needed to include a killer whale, blue flowers and be roughly lap-sized!

I sat looking at the clothes for months, and realised that there weren't enough to just make a standard t-shirt quilt. This actually provided an easy road to get started - I made some 12 inch patchwork blocks to incorporate into the quilt. I had won some gorgeous blue-flowered fabric (True Blue by P&B Textiles) from the lovely Susan, and Jodi (one of my favourite bloggers) had started posting weekly tutorials for a quilt-a-long of her favourite patchwork blocks, so I chose 4 of those to make. 

That was the easy part done! To avoid the t-shirts for a little longer I then got to work on the Killer Whale. I found a paper-pieced pattern, and after 2 days solid work was so pleased with the outcome! In fact I was so pleased that I decided to paper piece a tardis too, seeing as the recipient is a huge Dr. Who fan!

With a bit of help from my instagram friends I worked out that I needed to make each item of clothing up to the same size as the patchwork and paper-pieced blocks that I had made. And so I finally got cutting, and interfacing (I just used light-weight cheap interfacing and it worked a treat!), and sewing until I had each item of clothing represented in some way. For some t-shirts I was able to cut out the picture and just leave that as a whole block. For others I needed to cut out the logos and frame with fabric borders, or cut two logos and then stitch them into the same block. After adding sashing and borders, the quilt top was complete and I breathed a huge sigh of relief!

Little did I know that quilting this was going to be the most difficult part of the process. I tried FMQ (but just couldn't get the quilt to move smoothly) and straight horizontal lines (that ended up uneven and pulled the fabric). After ripping all that out I decided to go with randomly placed straight lines, and set up my table so that the quilt was as well supported as possible. I think the weight of the quilt (with the different types of fabric and the interfacing) caused too much drag and really made quilting this difficult. But it worked out in the end - phew!

I pieced a back together from the left-over fabric that I had and used some navy stripes for the binding.

Once I started working on this quilt properly, nearly 2.5 months ago, I promised myself I wouldn't make anything else until I had finished! I apologise for the lack of blog posts, but am looking forward to getting back to creating now!

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