Quilt Diary - Weeks 3 & 4

The last 2 weeks have been all about sewing the quilt - firstly sewing some wavy quilting lines with embroidery thread, and then sewing lots and lots of crystal beads on top.  My deadline for getting the quilt to the post office was today, and to be honest I would liked to have sewn a few more lines of beads on (as well as more quilting lines), but I ran out of time and had to stop (I was also running out of beads, despite making 2 orders!).  Still, I guess I should be pleased that I managed to make a quilt in such a relatively short time.  The next time I see it will be at the Festival of Quilts in August, so the final quilt will be revealed then!

Quilt Diary - Week 2

Week 2 of the quilt was all about sewing the main piece and borders together to make the quilt top.  Then I sewed the 3 quilt layers together (top, wadding and backing fabric) and added the hanging sleeve on the back.  I also sewed together off-cuts from the quilt to make a notebook cover for my friend's birthday!

Quilt Diary - Week 1

My new felt quilt  (based on rock layers) has been in the planning (well in my mind at least) since I made my quilt for last year's Festival of Quilt show at the NEC (see my blog back in August 2011).  For this year's quilt I thought I'd try and blog my progress on the different stages of making the quilt - with about a month to finish before the deadline to send it to the NEC for this year's exhibition.  Nothing like cutting it fine!

So here's Week 1, which was all about laying out the fleece fibres and felting them.  I made 3 separate pieces of felt: the main design and 2 pieces for the borders.  Here are the photos of the dry fleece prior to felting.  And to give you an idea of the size, the main design piece started out at around 175 x 75cm (which shrank down to around 120 x 50cm after felting).