Birthday Quilt Project – 3 weeks to go! 

Thank you to everyone who sent messages of encouragement for my last blog post about the Birthday quilt! With my little girls birthday now 3 weeks away I really need to get cracking with this quilt! I thought I would share an update as to where we are at!

The next job was to sort the placement of squares the patchwork. I think I find this bit harder than the actual quilting process. Trying to find the best way of mixing up the squares so they look random enough, you don’t get too many of the same colour in one spot, don’t get two of the same pattern next to each other. I don’t know if anyone has thought of an actual formula for this! But I just place them all down in rows, switch up the order on the next row and so on and so on until I get to the end. Then I’ll stand back and look at and swap any areas that don’t look right.

Once I was happy with the layout, I collected all the squares up in rows and sewed them together end to end till I had 12 long rows. I took photos of my layout so I could keep referring back to it to make sure I kept everything in the order I wanted.

Then I sewed all my rows together from top row to bottom row making sure I opened up all my seams as I sewed which will help keep the patchwork flat when it comes to quilting.

I want to do the quilt in the same style of the original one I made, with a plain border around the patchwork, so my next task is to get fabric for that and the backing fabric and then we’ll be on to quilting!