Roses for Helen, a quilt.

I wanted a quilt which would go with my cousins new room. White and pink with a touch of green.

I found some material, white with pink flowers, I had intended to go to my comfort zone and make a logcabin.  However, once I took a better look at the material I decided there was rather too much yellow in it, as the pink flowers were accompanied by yellow ones. 

So still liking the pink flowers I decided to fussy/fancy cut them out and work out my quilt from there. They did not turn out to be friendly sizes with one bunch at 8 by 8" and the other 8 by 9.5"

As is my wont I made hard work of figuring it out, scribbling away on bits of paper till the light bulb went on. 

Laid it out and I was a patch short ( I forgot to count the middle) and realised I had inadvertently created a design review moment. I had intended to lay all the pink on pink squares with the stripes running top to bottom.  If I had made enough two piece squares that may still have been the plan.

Now I played around and wanted a solid square in the middle. I came up with two options

Lay out 1 dark pink to the edge

Lay out 2 light pink to the edge

I was a bit indecisive and asked opinions of friends, at work and on Facebook quilting groups, of course I ended up with an even split between the two options (and one suggestion I go with the colour of the carpet!) and had to make the choice myself after all. As you can see I went for the pink middle option.

Finished the middle section, added a thin edge (ironically it does look a bit like the carpet) then to add the corner flowers and a wider boarder. So to deciding what to use for the wide boarder and the backing, again it was either the dark pink or the light.

I spread them out laid the top down, snapped with the trusty digital and then made my choice.

 Looks better to me on the dark.

Dark pink

Light pink

mini quilt

                                                                                                                              I took a small break from the big quilt at this point and made a mini quilt with some of the scraps. It has gone to a friend at work (the recipient of all my other doll house size quilts so far) to share between her daughter and her niece.

It just felt good to get something finished at this juncture even if it was not the whole main quilt.

So enthusiasm refreshed back to the big quilt and got the dark pink boarders with flower corners attached.

Pink with boarders

I decided to quilt leaves onto the quilt, I made cardboard templates in two sizes and drew the design on using a washable felt tip pen.

Using white thread on the main part of the quilt and a thread matching the very darkest pink for the first dark strip and the leaves on the wide dark pink boarder. 

Quilt on the hoop

The upper leaf has been sewn, the one at the bottom is marked out waiting to be sewn.  used my 21" hoop for this!

As the wadding (batting in the US) is modern synthetic stuff I can get away with this fairly minimal quilting.  It makes quite a soft flexible quilt.

Hand quilting finished and a machine sewn line around the outer edge (of the dark thin border) on to the binding.  Back to the pale pink for that and a new method for me, use double the width of fabric, fold it in half, stitch the two cut edges to the front of the quilt fold over and hand sew the "fold" on the reverse.
My friend introduced me to it and this looked like a good time to start.

I was surprised just how much I enjoyed hand sewing the binding, I found it rather soothing.  Popped on a label (I have just started doing that, and retrospectively adding them to the quilts still in my possession) tossed it in the washing machine to remove the pen and it is finished.

Pink Quilt

Displayed on a double bed

Roses for Helen