Quilt No. 23: Christmas Swirl

Christmas Swirl QuiltI’m on a roll… or should that be a bolt (of fabric)? This table runner was surprisingly quick to make and quilt. I took a couple of gratuitous shortcuts, such as daring not to baste the quilt sandwich together and merely relying on a firm press with a hot iron to keep everything together. I got away with it.

The quilt itself is made up of numerous 60° triangles with intervening diamonds, all cut from strips of stripes. The finished runner is quite long at 84″ and is 13″ wide. It traverses the length of our dining table with a small overhang at each end. Quilting was quick and simple stitch-in-the-ditch along the diagonals emphasising the diamond shapes.

The fabric is by Northcott and was obtained in Canmore, Canda whilst we were on hols. The pattern was called Triangle Frenzy Swirl and purchased on our previous USA trip two years ago.

Quilt No 017: Aldi Christmas Special

img_7435_wI can’t believe it has been over a year since I have completed a quilt. That’s not to say I haven’t been quilting – I have a couple of tops that I have been procrastinating over (I really hate laying out and pinning), one of which is a year late being delivered (so sorry Beth and Mike!). These two table runners use Christmas-themed fat quarters that were part of Aldi’s recent ‘So Crafty’ promotion. You really can’t go wrong with six fat quarters for less than £4. They’re not necessarily patterns and contrasts that I would have chosen but after cutting them according to Barbara Chainey’s ‘Fast Quilts From Fat Quarters’ cutting plan, I put them together to make the main squares (12″x12″), before sashing and binding with left over fabric.

I used basic stitch-in-the-ditch quilting in the long table runner, and a holly leaf design of my own making for the shorter side table runner below. I actually quilted the smaller runner first, and had such a hard time marking the quilting pattern on the dark fabric that it put pay to more complex quilting on the larger.

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