variations on a theme... another colourful quilt

Thanks for your comments on my Ngaio Blouse post. I am taking your advice and have started working on another one.

Meanwhile, I have finished my postage stamp quilt. I just loved working on it. I made it for our spare bedroom, which always looks a little bit unloved. Do you have a room that is not often used and resembles a charity shop back room most of the time? This is a fair description of our spare bedroom. Apart from serving as a dumping ground for a great variety of stuff, this little room doubles as an office space for Richard. He doesn't make good use of it and more often than not, he sits at the kitchen table and works there. His antique chunky desk is really just another surface on which we pile up clutter.... Richard periodically files all the paperwork that I leave there, which is handy. Come to think of it, the messy desk might be the reason why he works at the kitchen table....  The room used to be Sam's bedroom, who had a love for all things orange. The walls were orange until it was halfed in size when we built the extension (it is still a good sized space). Richard started painting it white but for some reason never finished. One wall is half and half, which Richard claims is on purpose but I am not buying it. I hate it but not as much as I hate painting and Richard is digging his heels inAnyway, the room needs a bit of a tidy and a bit love. Sam's friend is moving in for a few weeks and it is not fit for purpose at the moment. A quilt always brightens a room up and hopefully Sam's friend welcomes a homely room.

This quilt was made entirely from stash and many many little pieces of scraps, which I lovingly cut to size. Ok, I am not completely honest here, I didn't actually like the cutting scraps to size part.... Jo also sent me some of her scraps, which makes the quilt extra special. It was her own postage quilt that inspired mine after all. The finished size of each little square is 5 by 5 cm. I had no old sheets or any other largish piece of suitable fabric for the back. I also didn't fancy piecing from scraps so I bought two short lengths of slightly different pieces of plain fabric in grey tones. One has a tiny houndstooth pattern, the other is stripy. I joined them with two colourful strips that I pieced together from yet more scraps.

It took me ages to decide on the quilting. I tried diagonal lines across the quilt both by machine and hand and didn't like either. I also tried chevrons, which I liked but I didn't fancy the stop and turn every few centimetres. It took me ages to rip out the unloved quilting attempts. I ended up quilting along the seam lines, which gives a quite pleasing checkerboard pattern on the back. I am trying to be more adventurous with colourful quilting thread but I find it rather difficult. I know, considering how colourful all my quilts are, this is a bit weird. But I did make myself use a variegated thread from Aurifil which blends together pink and orange shades.

The binding is made from leftovers from this top. I love this fabric very much. The binding remains my favourite part of making a quilt, particularly stitching the binding down with tiny almost invisible stitches on the back. It is very therapeutic after a tiring day. My corners are not as neat as I would like them to be, at least not on the front. I am not sure why this is, it is something that I noticed in all my quilts. A detail that is quickly forgotten and easily ignored.

As you can see, dog and boy approve of the new quilt and it has yet to find its way into the spare bedroom.... at this very moment, it forms the roof of a blanket den in the living room. James and Alistair like chilling out in this den, listening to podcasts. Fine by me, we'll tidy up after the school holidays. Two more weeks to go!

Thanks for visiting. Have a lovely day wherever you are.