Single girl assembled

a glimpse of our new backyard

The "single girl" quilt is now assembled. It turns out I had only bought enough batting and backing fabric for the twin size so I couldn't make it larger after all.I finished the piecing last week, then sewed together the back panel which is orange floral My Folklore fabric. Before assembling you can use the template provided in the pattern to mark the hand quilting lines. I liked the way the circles look so I did use the pattern.

Here's a picture that shows the hand quilting:

I marked the lines on with a 2B pencil

I've done the bottom row of the quilt so far. It's a twin so it shouldn't take too long, except insofar as it always takes too long to finish hand quilting a quilt. I'm already thinking about my next quilt so I have to try to stay motivated to finish this one.

I basted with safety pins this time, much quicker!

A detail of the hand quilting stitches

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Single girl quilt update

Sorry I've kind of gotten out of the habit of posting! But now my camera is back and working again. I've also been inspired to try to finish up my single girl quilt top. This stage is very satisfying, I've finished all the quarters, and ironed them and I now have a nice neat stack that just needs to be put together into complete rings.

So far I have 5 out of the 12 rings completed (shown above). This is the amount needed for the twin quilt. But I'd like to make the quilt bigger so I've had the idea to finish the quilt top as suggested in the pattern, but then add extra plain panels on the sides to make it wider. This way the rings cover the top of the bed, but the sides are plain.

I'll have to find some muslin to match the one I've been using if I go ahead with the side panels. The muslin was from a curtain, so I'm not sure if I can find more of it that matches. I'm not even sure if muslin was the best choice for the background. I figured the curtain had been washed a lot so there was no evidence of pilling but a quilt can take so long to make it makes sense to use top quality materials. Well it's definitely too late now!
In case you're wondering, I finally gave up the hand quilting and finished up the quarters by machine. I guess it was nice having a portable project while we were selling our house. I had to put away my sewing machine for showings, and I was also getting kicked out of the house all the time. But now that we're settled in the new house I can leave my sewing machine out on my desk in my own workroom.

My thoughts now are that I prefer machine piecing for quilt tops but I still love hand quilting once the quilt is assembled. Although I do think I benefited from trying the hand piecing because it forced me to slow down, so the pieces are more accurate. Tiny errors can really compound so now I know I have to work carefully from the start in order to be happy with the finished result.

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Hand piecing

So I've tried it out and it looks like I'll be hand-piecing the single girl quilt. I didn't sew the pieces together in the order it suggests in the instructions since I wanted to see a finished square and see whether I was happy with using the muslin for the background fabric.

Denyse Schmidt's Single Girl quilt instructions suggest sewing all the first quarter rings first, then all the second quarters etc. It makes a lot of sense to put together batches at a time and then you could also chain piece as well and save time and thread.

Part of the reason I went ahead with a full ring was that I had laid out the whole quilt and made sure I was happy with the prints in each ring. Mainly I was checking that there were no duplicate prints in each ring.

The rings are mainly all the same, except you substitute in a few different prints so the overall effect appears random. I had done that and spent some time making sure I liked the placement of my random prints. So I want to keep all the pieces for each ring together as I go along.
Now that the first square is done (11 more to go!) I'm really happy with the results. When I sewed my last quilt I quickly machine pieced it and while I was fine with the way it turned out in the end I was a bit bothered by the way some of the squares didn't line up perfectly. In retrospect that was also about cutting out imperfectly - some of the little pieces of fabric I had were just slightly too small and I wanted to make them work.

So as I was methodically hand sewing my ring together I found I was able to line up the quarter rings almost perfectly. And I was thinking of a saying that my grandfather used to say from time to time: If something is worth doing, it's worth doing well.

This simple phrase haunts me. Anytime I do something in a rushed, haphazard way and I know it's not going to turn out as well as it could I have a sort of guilty feeling. I question whether it's worth doing, and if so why am I not doing it well?

So in this case I'm slowing down and I think it will be worth it in the end. Not that I'm against machine piecing! Not at all. I may very well go back to it for my next quilt. Which I'm trying not to think about so that I can focus on this one. But I will say the next one is going to be made up of yellow prints. I love yellow.

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Single girl cut out

All my Single Girl quilt rings are now cut out and ready to sew. I finished up with the cutting at the workroom during Quilt Sunday, then when I got home laid out everything on our living room floor. After a few more tweaks I'm finally happy with all the prints I have and how they're arranged so it's time to sew it together.

Katrina asked me about whether I would do hand piecing and I said "no" to doing that. But tentatively because I was thinking about it. I did a little reading online last night, and found an appealingly simple discussion/tutorial on the purl bee.

I started hand piecing but I'm not sure if my patience will hold out. I actually like the idea of having a little portable craft project on hand. Especially as we're still showing the house, so setting up my sewing machine and putting it away all the time is an extra chore. But it still means really slowing down the creation of this quilt.
And seeing all those circles lined up on the floor got me really excited about the quilt top!

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The single girl update

The two purple floral prints are Liberty

So I've made lots of progress cutting out pieces for the single girl quilt and I have lots of fabric to spare. It's a great way to use up scraps as the main part of the quilt is just solid white. Although of course you can change that and I've seen some great versions with colour backgrounds.

The purple floral at the bottom of this picture is Liberty

I haven't decided for sure but I think my background is going to be a cream coloured muslin. It seems to harmonize better than white with several of the vintage fabrics I've used. Almost all the fabrics were odds and ends from my stash, but I did buy a few of my favourite pieces on holiday. They're all Liberty prints from a few different places.

The 3rd-from-left floral is Liberty fabric cut from a nightgown from the Gap that was too big.

Our trip began with a flight to Glasglow and I just happened across a great fabric store while we were looking for a bus stop. It's called Mandors, and it was a large shop with lots of variety, including a corner full of tartan wool fabric. They also had some great Liberty prints, even some large scrap pieces of Liberty fabric in a basket.

The 2nd from the top is Liberty fabric from the Glasgow shop

One of my other favourite fabrics was from etsy, a tiny set of 24 quilt squares made from vintage fabric. But they were too small! I liked them so much I seamed them together so that I could create the 12 pieces needed for the pattern piece. Extra work but the print was so perfect, with purple and orange, I just hope the seam doesn't show too much.

The orange and purple floral near the top is the one I seamed together from smaller pieces.

I'm liking the orange and purple together.
And finally of course there's also lots of prints from the workroom, including this adorable Matrushka doll print. I just picked up a big stack of fat quarters there at Quilt Sunday (where I did more chatting than cutting but had a great time). Next I'll show you the pillows I made with the green bamboo print!

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