Finished Quilt!

Now that the hottest weekend is here, I've finished the quilt!

And though it isn't the weather to use a quilt in, it is good for drying it after the first washing it's had since 2007.

The good: warm, love the soft textures and colours of the fabrics. I like how the fabrics are all re-used, from clothing or curtains, and the stuffing is from an old pillow. And it is a finished project- woo hoo!

The bad: why did this take SO LONG? Definitely have negative feelings towards it because it was in my to-do pile for 3 YEARS. It would be different if it was a difficult project, but really, it was easy to put together, just hard to stay motivated to finish it.

The ugly: the zigzag stitch around the edge. Grr. The design gives a crenelated edge on the sides, so I'm not going to even think about binding it. What I'm considering is another line or two of the same zigzag stitch in different colours of thread, maybe a green and a white. Or maybe as the edges fray they will look better.

The quilt has cleared out a bit of my fabric stash, but with almost perfect timing my parents sent me more, 1 lb 8 oz according to the customs tag. (I especially like the pumpkin-orange fabric, so this isn't really a complaint.)

Last weekend, I went to the big historical quilt show at the V&A which did help with the motivation to finish my quilt. It was a stroke of luck: in a "what are your plans for the weekend" conversation on Friday, a friend at the office mentioned how her man was going to move a truck instead of accompanying her to the show, so she had spare tickets to the show and to London! We had a great time.

Rather than writing a boring essay on how I'm not into fancy quilts, I'll just stick to my favourite things:

• Matching of pattern to shape- especially the patterns of the animal aplique on the quilt they used for the tea towel print, but also diagonal patterns on squares giving the impression of more, smaller triangles


• Building up images (birds, butterflies, pinwheels, roses, etc.) from small bits of several different fabrics


• Using cross-stitch to stitch on aplique, as on the Australian prison ship quilt, or large-ish straight stitches to add detail to the edge of the leaves like on the quilt featuring Aesop's fables


• Gathered border around scallop-shape blocks, brilliant solution to matching all those curves but also a lovely additional texture


• Machine stitching in the "white space" of letters, so the text is all puffy (This was from a modern quilt, but as per usual, I forgot to note who made it! I'm awful.)