Quilt N°1 - finished!

Finally! I have finished my first Quilt! (And I took a lot of photos of it ;) )

It was a great experience to make a quilt. There are so many steps in the making:

This year I started sewing with a few totes. Then I came across some fabric I liked and bought just for the look of it (the robots in green and blue). I browsed the internet for some more bag tutotials and came across Jessica's blog How About Orange. You know how it goes: I clicked here and there and ended up on Elizabeth's blog Oh, Fransson!. Elizabeth makes modern quilts and is great at explaining techniques. Her modern quilts were a real eye-opener. Here in Germany quilts are not so common and I only knew these that are made with batik fabrics. I admired their craft(wo)manship but I could not imagine me making a quilt like those. With these modern quilts however I felt that they were the perfect creative hobby for me. 

I bought Elizabeth's book "the practical guide to patchwork" and picked the "small plates" pattern. Now I could get started with my favourite part of the project: the choice of fabrics. I started only in blues and greens, added some browns until I came upon Lotta Jansdotter fabrics in beautiful orange. I decided to add orange to the brown stack and found the most beautiful (and most expensive) fabric to complete this stack:  Birch by Ink & Spindle in saffron. For the solid I used some great shot cotton by oakshott (by the way: They changed their online shop so now you can see the prices also in US$ and €).

Remember: this was all around Easter. By the end of June I had finished the blocks and decided for a layout. And then? - Well, for a long time there happened nothing. I had a lot of work to do (the money earning kind), other projects (birthdays!) and I did not quite know how to proceed. If you check the photo where I did the layout you can see, that the squares were no proper squares. That happened because my first (very cheap) sewing machine did neither have a 1/4" foot nor a walking foot and I was not experienced enough to manage anyway. I tried to sew rows but it turned out uneven. Hence I had to use my best friend the seam ripper quite a lot before I could go on.
Moreover I did not want my quilt to be the first piece to have a try at the techniques needed. Hence I made the placemats and baby quilts first - more time gone.
These summer holidays finally gave me the time needed to finish the quilt top and this autumn I managed to quilt and finish it - yeah!!!

It took a lot longer than anticipated by me but it was so much fun! There are already a few more projects in planning (even fabric bought and cut).
Today was glorious weather and I had to grab this opportunity to take a lot of photos of the finished quilt. Beware!

At our "Golden Gate Bridge"

 

With horses

  

The back