Laptop

Perhaps I should re-title this post "it was a dark dark night" and save it for Halloween. I took these pictures in actual proper daylight but despite my best efforts they appear to have taken on an 'all pervading cloud of doom' style of lighting. Nevermind, I suspect they are foreshadowing the current weather. When it starts properly raining the outside noises fade away as the water wraps the buildings in a protective film, and half a glance out the window usually confirms any suspicions. It's only when you can hear the hypnotic patter of hundreds of drops, and the resultant squeeks of people caught out in the open that we know that the heavens have truly opened. It is bucketing it down at the moment, a low thrum drowning out even my computer's decibel-accurate helicopter impersonation. I'm really glad I'm inside.

Anyway, enough confirming national stereotypes for the day. Way back when it was pretending to be summer, at the quilt show in August, I picked up a few 'play' packs - including a charm pack of Amy Butler's Midwest Modern range. I've had the squares floating around on my desk for a while, playing with different ideas and colour combinations and thinking about what I could make with 30 4 1/2 inch squares.

The finished quilts that I saw on my internet travels that I liked the best were the ones that took the charm pack and turned it into half square triangles; it's very easy, you match up your pair, draw a line down the diagonal on the back of one square, and sew a 1/4 inch seam either side of the line. Cut down the middle and hey presto, triangles made into squares.

In the end, simplicity won over anything too fancy, and this is what I unvented:





A little lap quilt, with the charm pack in the middle and deep turquoise borders using the batik fabric I bought for the Sparkling Orange Mint Choc Chip quilt and found to be too discordant. Here it's a perfect match, and brings a large table mat sized quilt into the lap quilt scale.


For the backing and the border I picked two of my favourite prints from the Midwest Modern series to tie it all together. The pink binding is the same print as the backing, just in pink obviously.

It isn't perfect (I'm going for characterful - that's my story and I'm sticking to it), and matching points on 8 triangles was always going to be optimistic, but I can see that I'm getting better with the practice, and that's what it's all about.


For the quilting this time I branched out from the swirly spirals and embraced the girly feel of the quilt so we have swirls and little hearts, in pink, all over the centre part of the quilt;

And then two rows of wiggles and hearts in the borders:


With the quilt production line that's running around here I'm beginning to think that I need to move to somewhere cooler, where curling up on the sofa requires a lap quilt on top of two big quilts and two knitted blankets - maybe an igloo!


PS - is it crazy that I choose the label, not by the necessary washing instructions, but by which one best colour co-ordinates with the quilt?