Part 3

Right, back to my wrapping paper quilt, as it's been known. After some minor 'how do I barely have enough sashing when I thought I majorly overestimated' drama, the quilt top came together. I forgot to take a photo of the completed quilt top, so you'll have to make do with these two pics for now!

Yours truly, hard at work

The back of the quilt top. Isn't it beautiful! Love it almost as much this way round!

So, with the top complete I started to make plans for the back. Again the decision was made pretty quickly - I decided to use Orla's design. I had originally planned to have cream fabric on the back to match the print, but I couldn't find any that worked. So instead I went with this:

Isn't it beautiful? It's such a gorgeous brown. Feels really weird saying that having just finished reading Hadley's blog! For those who don't know Hadley, saying she dislikes brown is a major understatement.

I had in mind the exact ribbon I was after, and thankfully I found it :) Here it is, zigzag-stitched on.

So, stem complete, it was time to work on the leaves. I found a picture of the design online, traced it and created a cardboard template. After a lot of drawing and cutting (some of which done during a girly craft evening with friends and fondue, good times), I ended up with this.

Ta-da!

There is one leaf of each fabric from the front of the quilt, and two in matching-ish solids. This was mostly due to budget constraints, but I actually really like the effect.

Making the leaves was really tricky! If you look at the design, you'd think that if you drew a line from the point through the curved bit, they'd be symmetrical through that line... but they're not. There's a very slight difference. It was a big enough difference to matter to me, but not big enough to be noticeable unless you lined the leaf up with the template. This led to a lot of confusion when trying to figure out if I was making a 'left leaf' or a 'right leaf':

- OK, when the template is this way up, it looks like the leaf on the left

- When it's traced onto the bondaweb, it still looks like a left leaf
- I then put this on top of the fabric, it still looks like a left leaf
- But the fabric is upsidown
- So it's an upsidown left leaf
- Is that a right leaf or a left leaf?!
- My head hurts

I got it wrong initially so the final product is a mirror image of what I planned, but that's not too big a deal :) The trickiest leaf was the Sunkissed one with the writing. It took selotape, baking paper, 2 rulers and a lot of patience, but I managed to get the word 'grow' in the middle of the leaf with the writing perfectly horizontal. Woop woop!

After the cutting came ironing...

... then a looooot of zigzag-stitching (challenging as broken sewing machine foot meant my machine wanted to go not-at-all or crazy-fast)...

<You'll have to imagine a photo of some zigzags for me, I forgot to take a close-up>

... and then it was done!

This photo actually captures the colours far better than any of the finished quilt photos, so enjoy it now! 

Come back next time for the quilting - my sewing machine foot was fixed and I tried some curves :)