I was about to post a picture showing my progress on my latest blanket project when I realised I needed to rip out at least half of the seams to correct some mistakes. Bummer. I wish I didn’t need to learn things the hard way so often. The project underway is my first attempt at patchwork and quilting by making the baby sized Lasting Warmth Quilt from Wendy Chow’s terrific book The Quilted Home Handbook. The good news is that I have not made any irretrievable mistakes and will just need to spend some time seam ripping, correctly squaring up the errant blocks and re-sewing them into the quilt top.

The quilt is constructed by making up two-colour geometric blocks and then sewing these into strips with single colour blocks in between. If you look closely at the image you will see that some of my blocks don’t line up correctly. This is because I failed to square up all my blocks at each stage of construction. The mushroom-coloured square-in-square blocks and the lilac-coloured nine-patch blocks are the ones I didn’t square up correctly and they are throwing out the whole pattern. Fortunately, just as coders and writers have the backspace key, sewists have the seam ripper! Mistakes don’t need to be permanent.

I had an unfortunate experience recently with a workshop that was supposed to be an intro to quilt making but turned out to be an intro to exactly the type of patchwork I don’t want to do, using floral and print fabrics I would normally avoid. I ended up not finishing the patchwork in the class and just throwing it all in my fabric offcuts bin. A week later I saw Wendy’s book that has loads of projects using my style of fabrics and much more information about the whole process of patchwork and quilting. I picked the smallest size quilt from one of the easier projects and some beautiful fabrics from Fableism to make it up in. I’m sure it will be terrific for my grandchild when I finish it (hopefully before said grandchild is born) and worth the time taken to correct mistakes. I’ll post again when I get the top made.