Warm and cosy at last.

I'm having a crazy week. After my week off I've launched head first back into work, whilst also watching Le Tour every evening. However before all of that I managed to finish off my quilt.


The biggest quilt I've made and thus the biggest quilt I've quilted, it was hard work moving it around. However, I breezed through the quilting quite happily, doing a basic stitch in the ditch around each of the 4" squares.

I decided to make the binding quite wide one rather than narrow like last time, so measured it up so that the binding was the same width as the white strips (3/4 of an inch). I then quite happily stitched the binding on all the way around, following a tutorial for mitred corners... but discovered when was stitching the binding round onto the back that I should have done the corners slightly differently, as I hadn't allowed enough fabric in the fold of my corner to make a nice square corner. As I discovered this after I had sewn the binding on all the way around and started hand stitching the back I decided to deal with it, and now my corners are slightly rounded rather than nice pointy corners.


Hand stitching the binding on the back took AGES. And by ages I'm not exaggerating. I started the hand stitching at about 7:30pm on Saturday night, cosy under the quilt sat on my couch watching TV stitching away. Excluding a break for some food and a few other small distractions, I finished at about 2am, at which point I gave up on the opening stage time trial of Le Tour for some sleep. I followed the comment posted by Aneela on her blog about using a blind hem stitch rather than a slip stitch, and agree wholeheartedly that it is much better! However, if anyone has any tips for speeding up hand stitching, please share them with me!

I'm definitely still not loving the quilt. I don't hate it, but I certainly don't love it. However, I've been sleeping under my quilt (and my blanket and duvet) ever since finishing it, and have been super cosy every night, so it's a success in that regard!


Now that's finished I can regain focus on some other projects. I cut out my pyjamas, using the pattern for the bottoms that I made a short while back and then used the top from a pair of PJs (from Myer) to draw up a pattern for the top. Hopefully it'll all work out when I get around to sewing it together.

And to finish this post; something I was coveting in Big W the other day: