Magpie Quilts

I recently had a request to make a baby quilt from fabric from a bridesmaid dress. The quilt was for the baby of the couple my customer was bridesmaid for. I accepted the challenge with just a little hesitation as bridesmaid dress fabric is a lot harder to work with than the cottons I usually make my quilts from! Navy, green & grey Baby Quilt After a few issues getting the bridesmaid dress across the border and delivered to my house, we worked out a color scheme and some coordinating fabric. Every time I do something new, I also learn something unexpected, like how to avoid nasty border fees! Fabric selection Navy, green and grey are a great color combination and not one I've done before, so it was fun to put them together into a chevron pattern. Because I didn't want to have too many seams in the bridesmaid dress fabric (it was 100% polyester and the edges frayed a lot!) I made a template and cut from that. The dress was a fitted one with lots of seams and there...

Looking back over my blog stats for the past year, it seems that quilt tutorials are the easy winners for the posts that you like to read! So, I am going to attempt a Block of the Month (BOM) and hope I can make it straight through 12 months! If you're a beginning quilter, I am just going to concentrate on making blocks and the basic quilt top. If you want great instructions on quilt finishing, I recommend Joanne Middleton's Finishing Well DVD found here at Patchwork Schoolhouse ! For January February, you are going to get two blocks! All blocks will be based on a 9-patch grid (3 squares by 3 squares) and are traditional blocks. You may know them by the names I use or by another name - traditional blocks are like that! The first is the basic 9-patch block. Normally, this block is seen with darker prints in the 4 corners and a dark in the center, but it looks completely different when you change the center to a light coloured fabric and the outside squares to all dark. A...