A new laptop means a new laptop case! And considering my newly established obsession with quilting the perfect project.
In contrast to my last quilting project, I wanted something bold, plain fabrics, small, to try stitching visible quilting (rather than just stitching in the ditch) and play with designing.
I already had the blue, red, and yellow fabrics from previously purchased fat quarters, so just needed to add white and black and I had batting left over from my first quilt. It was for this project that I started thinking about only using second-hand fabric, luckily we have a couple of shops that are good for crafting supplies so it didn't take long to find plain white and plain black, finding the colours probably would have been trickier.
I created my own design to ensure that I only needed a small amount of yellow and that I really understood what I needed to do: working out the sizing, adding seam allowance, deducting the black frames, and creating a blocking plan so I knew how to bring it all together.
It was a lot of small pieces in different orders, so I made each block individually rather than cutting all the pieces and getting them confused.
When I started to realise my sizing wasn't quite working, so I added some extra to the side and bottom.
Getting closer.
A fair amount of time went into figuring out how to piece together the front and back nicely.I decided to add the binding at the same time as sandwiching the two sides together. But a last check on the size revealed with the seam it wasn't going to be big enough!
I'm still a bit puzzled by how it ended up so small. My design was set for 33cm x 49 cm, it turned out 23cm x 35cm. How it shrunk I haven't worked out. So I decided to add a side wall. Working out how to enclose all the seams will the side wall and binding was a mental challenge. So I added the side wall with seams facing outwards and the binding with seams facing outwards and hand finished onto the side wall.
The best thing about this project was the size, it came together pretty quickly and mistakes were unpicked pretty quickly. But the challenge was that there's little room for error, accuracy at this size is super important, and it's only my second ever quilting project. So it's not perfect. But I'm pleased with how it turned out and it fits!
What's the difference between patchwork and quilting?
- Patchwork is piecing together different pieces of fabric to create a larger single piece of fabric.
- Quilting is sewing together multiple layers of fabric to create a thicker fabric generally with a warmth layer in between.
A 'quilt' could literally be two pieces of fabric sewn one on top of the other. But in reality most 'quilts' as we call them (not to be confused with duvets or doonas) start as patchworks which are then quilted. So pieces of fabric sewn together into a larger piece of fabric then quilted to two other layers, one fabric back and one middle batting.
In preparing this item for entry into the Country Women's Association competition, I noted patchwork and quilting were two separate categories. In wondering what the difference was that I came across stained glass patchwork as a style, and it just so happened to match the Mondrian style, blocks of colours with black borders, just like a stained glass window.
I started designing this (in a spreadsheet) on January 15th and was completed for the competition entry on 1st February. Two and half weeks, gotta love a small project.