Even before I had finished my snowdrop quilt, I knew that I wanted to carry doing english paper piecing to make quilts. Its one of the crafting techniques that keeps my mind quiet, plus I get to play with beautiful fabrics. So I was looking for my next project and I’m in the phase of life where friends are having children so I figured if I made a baby quilt, there would be a baby aong to claim it soon enough.
I had also had this thought when I had bought a charm pack (Pre cut fabric squares) of jungle fabric from a craft show, I’d gone to some years earlier. I’ve also been a follower of talesofcloth on instagram for awhile and had admired her rosemallow quilt plus the versions others had done. So I put the two together, and planned to use the charm pack as the centres of the hexagon. I also found a mini charm pack of some prints in the same colour scheme which I wanted to use.
I started my fabric pull by going through my existing fabric collection and looking at what was a good colour match. After I found some, I went shopping to find a couple more. I didn’t really do any working out how many colors I needed, but I knew I wanted to include all the colours but in the slightly earthy tones of the charm pack I had.
One of the things I did learn from my snowdrops was that cutting out the paper shapes is not fun, so I bought them this time. All of this happened during the 2020 autumn lockdown. I managed to get all the planning done before I moved north but the papers were bought and delivered while I was up there. My original plan was to cut as many centres as I had charm squares and then see what size that gave me. In the package of the papers, I was also sent some tiny triangles, which meant that I could use the mini charm pack to make some additional centre hexagons.
At some point I then did some maths about what size I actually wanted and I needed a few more hexagons, so I used one of the fabrics I had bought to fill in
By the time I was close to finishing the quilt a couple of things had happened a) I’d been given vouchers to a fabric shop as a leaving present when I moved jobs and b) I had a due date for a baby that I wanted to gift this quilt to. I use the vouchers to buy a backing and binding fabric (and fabric for the next quilt but thats for another post). And then this is how I planned my quilting:
The quilting took a little longer to finish than the baby, but I did get it done in time to gift it to them the first time I met them, and I don’t think they’ll remember in the long run.
makingshyeni 