A quilt for a Chemotherapy Appeal

Two lovely friends of mine are organising an event to raise funds for the North Devon Chemopherapy Unit. There's going to be a "Bake Off" in High Bickington, in North Devon, next Wednesday, see more details here:



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If you're local why don't you come along and try some of the delicious treats that'll be there? You could even enter a cake yourself. There will also be lots of homemade crafts, jams etc for sale too. These are a couple of the lovely handmade goodies they're selling.

Some lovely crocheted bits and pieces

Don't these dolls look sweet?

They organised the same thing last year and it was an amazing success and raised an incredible £1000. It's going to be difficult to top that but they have lots of great prizes and goodies already, so fingers crossed.

I've made them a quilt to auction/sell/raffle - whatever they choose (I think it might be auction but not completely sure yet)

 
It's made out of recycled wool blankets. I love working with wool and there'll probably be lots of posts on here about making things with wool so I hope you'll like it too! If you have never used it look out for things like old wool blankets, sweaters etc - it cuts beautifully, doesn't fray, is easy to sew and beautifully soft and warm. And it generally has just enough stretch in it to help you with matching up pieces! Which was very handy with this quilt because the design and colours are so simple and classic that I think wonkyness in this quilt would have looked glaringly bad. So I tried extra hard to make sure everything lined up, and I'm really pleased with how it turned out. I especially love how the colours worked together.

Since it's for the chemo unit fundraiser I wanted to give it a link with this without making it too blatantly a "cancer quilt", which might limit who would be interested in having it. I did think about sewing a small pink ribbon applique on it but was worried it might spoil the simplicity of it, so in the end I quilted the ribbon shape in the middle instead, you can just see it here.

Quilting detail

There's very little quilting on it at all, just the 2 ribbons and a few straight lines to mirror the piecing. In fact, technically it isn't really a 'quilt' at all, because, I believe, a quilt has to have 3 layers - top, wadding of some kind and backing. The 'quilting' is then the means to hold the middle wadding section in place. But because the pieced wool top is so lovely and warm in itself (unlike thinner cottons for example), I don't feel it needs a;; middle section and it's just got a lovely soft, pale pink flannel cotton on the back.=

So therefore there's not so much need for any quilting - there's no middle section that needs holding in place, it just needs enough so that the 2 layers aren't too "flappy". I used more wool for the binding and then blanket stitched it down on the back.

This is probably the first of many wool quilts to put on here. In fact there'll be another one tomorrow - in a very different style.

See you then, Sally.