Patchwork Tales

Before going on holiday to the US back in August, I hadn't really been doing much work on my hand stitched patchwork lap quilt, mainly because I had run out of squares to sew together and needed to cut a whole new batch of squares/papers to make up the 9 square quilt blocks.  Here's a picture of a couple of blocks I had already sown together by hand, so you can get an idea of the colour scheme.

 

 

The day before we went away, I made a point of cutting out the remaining squares I needed so that I could take them away with me and do some work on them whilst we were travelling around in the campervan. 

I packed them away into two smallish pouches along with needles, scissors, pins, thread etc. and tucked them down the sides of my suitcase.  I was so pleased that I did, because I really enjoyed picking them up and putting them down at various times during our holiday.  It was really relaxing to start (if I was up early), or end the day with a bit of sewing and I managed to tack the paper backing onto over 100 squares whilst we were away.  I decided not to sew the squares together as I couldn't exactly remember which squares should be sown to which and didn't have the original blocks with me.  Perhaps I should just have taken a photo and had it in my camera, but I wasn't that organised.

To be honest though, in the end I probably wouldn't have had time to sew many together as prepping all the squares that I did, took right up until our last few days in Las Vegas.  As a consequence, I had a whole heap of squares to sit and sew together whilst watching TV, during the rest of the summer and into the autumn, to try to get the quilt finished in time for when it gets cold this winter.  Here's a photo of the squares I managed to get prepared.

 

It doesn't look like there's many here, but take it from me there's over 100.

 

Anyway, once home I slowly got back into sewing the squares together and the other night I finally finished the last quilt block.  It was a great feeling.  I immediately went up to the sewing room to lay them all out and decide how to arrange them for the quilt top.  It took a while and it didn't turn out quite as planned, but here's a picture of how the final design might look.  (Subject to last minute changes.)

 

 

 

I've now started sewing the quilt blocks together and am looking forward to getting all them all done and making the final two or more plain blocks which the birds will be appliqued onto. I'll post again when I get a little further on with this project.