A Happy Birthday Quilt

It was the birthday of one of my lovely, sewing friends today - Happy Birthday, Jen! Back in the Summer, another of my lovely sewing friends, Emma (she of Hope Sews fame!), had the wonderful idea that we could make Jen a quilt for her birthday (yes, back in the Summer, we were very organised - at that point anyway!). After a bit of deliberating about designs, Emma found a couple of possible ideas on Pinterest:




http://www.pinterest.com/pin/155092780890706696/

 


http://www.pinterest.com/pin/155092780889265863/

 So we decided we'd take our inspiration from these, and the plan was to get lots of Jen's family and friends to each contribute a heart for us. Maybe made from fabric that was special to them or associated with Jen in some way, or maybe with embroidered words on there. Now you can see why it was a good thing we started in the Summer!

Gradually the hearts started coming in, and fortunately Emma is far better organised than me and coordinated it all! We started the cutting and sewing part a good few weeks ago now. We got one of Jen's little ones to draw a gorgeous picture of her Mummy which we could use:



I traced this on to the fabric and machine embroidered it.

 And, despite our very early start on this one, it's just all come together over the last week. Here it is:

The hill is pieced with different 'greens'.

Here's the embroidered Jen:

We used bondaweb to place all the lovely hearts before sewing around them. I'll show you some of them close up:

We did have a slight, last minute hiccup after finishing it. I gave it a wash (a cold wash and with a colour catcher whatsit in there too) and when it came out we had a bleeding heart:

Unfortunately there was just nothing for it but an emergency transplant! Usually it's easy enough to prewash your fabrics before making a quilt (not that I'm great at bothering to do that with new fabrics, mind you), but with this project it was obviously a bit difficult. But it worked out OK in the end.

The back behaved itself much better with nice, safe fabric:




I am, however, now filled with admiration for all the quilt photos I've ever seen taken on a beach. The birthday celebrations were up by a beautiful beach today so it was the perfect opportunity to photograph it. It looked so easy to do, and yet...

It just wouldn't hang still. It didn't even feel that windy. Eventually, Maria took pity on me and came and helped!

Can you see her hand peeking round to hold it for me?!

Hopefully I'll be back tomorrow with some Christmas decorations, Sally.