I've been away from my blog the last seven days because last Saturday, I developed a sudden passion to put this little charm pack to work:



Using pre-cut fabric is out of character for me, so I only bought the one, and set myself a challenge to make a KING size quilt I decided to supplement the charm pack with yellow, blue, green and pink fabrics.

I first sewed the charms in sets of four, and then the supplementary fabric in sets of four. I cut those in half and sewed them together:



and then cut them in half again and sewed those halves together, creating some lovely pinwheels:



When I envisioned this quilt, I had decided to sash in blue or pink or white, because I had tonnes of those fabrics in my stash. However, when I laid my blocks out on those fabrics, I didn't like any of them.

I was stumped for a good hour, laying them out and looking at them again and again, asking BSP their input (and then dismissing their input! ;) ) and when BSP grew bored and wandered off, I contemplated my squares some more.

I went back to my stash and looked at the piles of fabric, thinking "Green?" "Orange?" And then had my Eureka moment. YELLOW.

I happily sashed my squares in yellow





And when I had my centre panel, I put it on point and added a border of green:



Which was when I had to reluctantly let go of my vision of a flagrantly girly, ultra feminine sweetly pretty girly quilt - quilted with free hand flowers and vines and leaves... I recognized that though this quilt was going to be feminine and fresh and lovely, it wasn't going to be girly.

This was really driven home while adding a yellow border to the green and deciding that I wanted to break up the yellow a bit, so added a little geometric detail in green and white:



And then, I added yellow triangles to square off the quilt - and that is where I failed in my mission. The yellow just looked like too much of a sea of yellow and I didn't have enough green to do a final border. I went back to the store where I got the green, but found it was all gone. And I broke down. I got another charm pack to add to the border on the sides



and the top:



But now when I look at the whole thing, I'm not sure it adds anything particularly marvellous:



(especially not in a picture in which a: the top hasn't been ironed and b: the sun is going down!)

Plus, the borders aren't really visible when the quilt is ON the bed:


of course, that's a king sized quilt on a queen sized bed. It's hard to tell. I think I may rip off the border and, using what's left of my original green and perhaps supplementing with a simliar green, do a green and white lattice on the borders instead.

Then I'm going to start piecing the back and fter that I'll have to begin my first attempt at quilting a KING SIZED quilt on my little Singer.

Wish me luck!