Aquas, Greens, and Blues

I love aquas, greens, blues, teal - oh my gosh, TEAL. When I was a little girl my favourite colour was blue. I was never fond of pink, in any of its shades. I think I accepted that some things only came in that colour but I much preferred things that were coloured differently. The first Barbie I chose didn't wear a pink sparkly dress but a blue pinstripe suit.

Growing up, green became more prevalent in my colour palette and once I dyed my hair red in my very early twenties the deal on teal was sealed. I think it's just perfect for delicate skin tones. But I'm babbling. I wanted to write about the pillows in my header. How did I come to sew these lovelies? 

 

It all started with my urge to sew a quilt using Film in the Fridge's rectangle squared block. I got most of the fabrics for my birthday in March 2011 but added a pretty teal STOF fabric and bought the Kona Snow for the sashing myself. I didn't buy the backing fabric, Kona Everglade, until much much later. With large projects I tend to buy what I need when I need it. Step by step to space the bills.

Obviously I had to mess up the math of the block because I wanted to work in centimetres and not inches as well as a different block size. I also decided to change my seam allowance after cutting the strips and squares - how very sensible, not.. Yeah, so I had to square up my blocks quite a bit afterwards. Whatever, a valuable lesson learnt

I did, however, delay completion quite a bit - I was once more scared to screw up my work. I dreaded to quilt my baby! This was when I needed a quick and easy project and the pillows were born. I used pinkchalkfabric.com's free "Gather Up Pillow" pattern but tweaked it in size. My pillows are 60cm x 40cm, larger than the pattern's 12" x 16". (The quilt is roughly 1,10m x 1,50m, or 43" x 59".)

Fast forward another two months or so and I got round to beating the fear. I wanted to make a baby quilt for a friend and had to "sacrifice" my quilt so hers would definitely be giftable. I certainly did mess up once or twice and the lines aren't all perfectly straight, but I really don't care. I was proud to have finally tackled my fear and this is my very first quilt, after all. Who'd expect it to be perfect? Is anything ever perfect? I love it dearly.

please ignore the wrinkled sheets

Okay, truth be spoken, the binding proved daunting and delay-worthy, too, and I abandoned my quilt in favour of the quickly approaching Christmas deadline. I machine bound the baby quilt. It is a lovely quilt (another post) but I wasn't 100% happy with the binding. So I hand stitched mine. Me! The one who used to hate sewing buttons onto clothes. Totally worth it, though. I possibly won't ever again resort to machine binding. I love the neat look and it's a pretty soothing exercise in the evening with a nice movie on the telly. Need to get a good extra lamp besides the sofa, though, or I'll strain my eyes too much.

 

 back detail

Final picture, my lovelies together. I really must take better pics but I must make do with my old camera and on top of that its still nasty and cold outside providing crappy light inside. Soo looking forward to spring and summer. Not a winter girl at all. :)

  

Okay, so this turned out pretty long.. babble babble..sorry. :)
Wishing you a wonderful week!