Periwinkle and the Challenge Winner

Did you guess which quilt won? Some of you did and it was clearly a winner amongst you too.

It was made by Emma Kirkpatrick and was number 8 and well deserved. Emma says that she googled the word Twist and that was her inspiration for her design.

 

What baffled you was which one you thought I had made. I really went off on a different tangent and my offering was quilt number 3. Not a bit of pink in sight. The reasoning behind my choice was to take the quilting aspect that the Amish are so renowned for and turn it into the design and I chose to applique a feather. It worked but was time consuming and had I have thought longer about it I would have done the feathers in Amish colours. It certainly got everyone thinking about it. A big thank you to everyone who joined in or emailed me.

 

I recently purchased from Petra Prins the lovely plastic template kit that is known as Periwinkle. I had seen it around in blog land and fell in love with it. These templates from Australia are super to use and make stitching by hand an absolute dream.

Wondering  what to use to try it out I had in front of me the fabrics that  I was using for my Noughts  and Crosses quilt. Well, it didn't take very long to cut the pieces out nor to sew them up and this is the result. A small baby quilt for a very special little lady due to join us very soon. Today it has been layered and is ready for quilting.

 

A few posts back I promised to show the back of my work. Someone asked me why and surely as it was going to be hidden what did it matter. The answer is it does matter. Pressing the seams are important if you want your quilt to lie flat and also I am not always sure which way seams should lie and often wish there was a diagram to say which way. Hand piecing gives much more flexibility in the way a seam can lie too. If you know of a neat way to deal with the seams then I am sure we would all love to learn how. I know I would. Besides, I personally like my work to be neat and tidy. This is a complex little block with many seams meeting in the middle and it could soon look a bit lumpy in places. I hope you can see how they have been pressed to lie flat. Nothing was pressed till the whole thing was completed and a border added.

This photo shows the seams before all the "dog ears" have been snipped off.

 

It looks much better with the "dog ears" snipped off.

Now for the quilting.

Happy Stitching.

Shirley.