A Spot of Sewing

After finally buying the correct needles for my sewing machine, and spurred on by watching The Great British Sewing Bee on Tuesday night (I'm liking this series even better than the last one), I finally got around to doing a spot of sewing this week. 

Initially, to test the new needles, I made a couple of lavender bags.  They seemed to work fine, so I progressed onto doing some work on my double quilt/eiderdown, by attempting to attach the front of the quilt to the old duvet that I'm using as wadding.

Unfortunately, the duvet is so thick that it wouldn't fit underneath the sewing machine foot, so I took the foot off and tried sewing without it on.  It was a bit of a disaster as I didn't have good control and gave up.  When I went back to it a couple of days later,  I decided to sew the front of the quilt to the duvet by hand.  I then did the same with the back.  It's not particularly neat, but I used a very strong thread so that it wouldn't break and come apart easily.   It will be covered by the binding anyway eventually.  I was really pleased when I was able to use the sheet I originally intended using for the back.  It now fitted as I had had to cut down the quilt front and duvet as it was far too big. 

As a consequence of the above, once sewn and trimmed, the eiderdown/quilt is now taking shape and looks great.  Here's a picture of how it looks before I sew down the seams of the strips of fabric on the front and add the binding to the edges. 

I'm not sure if I'll be able to do this with the machine or not, but if not, I will have to do it very neatly by hand.  I'll post again when it is completely finished.