Samoan Quilt

Adam has reminded me that I have not yet told you about my quilting experiences?! Now that my first ever quilt has been delivered as a Christmas present I can tell you all about it.

I was very surprised to find, when I visited the local Bookshop - Wesleys, that they had a book on beginner quilts for sale at a very reasonable cheap price so I snapped that up and decided to make a Samoan quilt for Olivia (a new addition to the world!)

My first experience was of trying to buy small quantities of Samoan fabric. I went to CCK where I had found they sold fabric and proceeded to mind my own business trying to match and blend colours. Several times I had to beat off the sales assistants who kept trying to take my rolls of fabric to the counter before I had finished getting the colour scheme right! I then tried to explain what I was doing with so many fabrics but I'm not sure they got the picture. They had never heard of a quilt and I think decided I was nuts to only want 20" off each roll of fabric so that I could cut it up and sew it back together again! Once my main colours had been selected the next problem was explaining that I needed a backing colour to match. Another 6 options later and I finally had the fabric ready to go so I let them carry my rolls to the counter.....

There was a pregnant girl at the counter who proceeded to lift the heavy rolls of fabric herself (I was the customer so was not allowed to assist) and measure my miniscule amounts required. Between our language difficulties and my conversions between cm and inches we got there! I eventually had my fabric and my piece of paper with quantities and costs written on it so I could take it to the till to pay.

Anyway having heard about my endeavours my friend here decided that she too would like to make her first quilt along side me. So began many Friday nights after work of cutting, sewing, chatting and drinking! Adam very kindly kept us supplied with nice dinners and otherwise kept out of the way of fabric strewn all around the lounge!

Of course there were a number of mishaps, quite a lot of unpicking of mistakes (Adam became a dab hand at this) and many lessons to be learnt (mainly - read the instructions first!!) but we got there and with the help of batting kindly brought over by Latika and Hedley we both got our first quilts made and were very pleased with the final results. I will be uploading photos of our progress to Flickr soon (I just need to get them off the computer at home).

Now I'm on to project number 2 which is so far going smoothly particularly due to the rotary cutter I bought when I was at home during Christmas. What a breeze it is doing all the cutting and ending up with straight lines! More info on this project later....