Portland Princess...

Our dear friend Tara moved to the US about a decade and a half ago. We miss her terribly but love the fact that she always makes time to catch up with us when she returns to Australia to visit her family. We love even more that she now has a little almost 2 year old daughter who will be accompanying her on this trip.

Tara is a friend of my blog and has made several comments over the past year so I'm hoping that she's currently winging her way over the ocean and not reading at the moment because this quilt is for little S. It's a bit like sending ice to the north pole using fabric that I purchased from the States but what else do you use for the princess in your life? Far Far Away by Heather Ross of course!

The pattern is inspired by and is a smaller version of Kaffe Fassett's Pastel Floral Parade Quilt featured in his Quilts in the Sun book. I had to work with the material I had so I created smaller squares and used less of them. We have the Princess and the Pea sitting centre stage surrounded by unicorns, frog princes, little snails and fields of flowers. The purple pushed my personal colour boundaries....I've never been a purple person but for a little girl, I think it's perfect. I made my own 'mattress pile' on the back with the left over border fabrics and quilted it in straight line vertical stitching. The quilt measures around 147cm square (57") so it's a lovely size for a cot, little bed or having a tea party with teddy.

Thank you Clare for being my holding up model after our indulgent day of holiday sewing today!

I heart Amy....

Butler, Kaffe Fassett, Anna Maria Horner, Tania Whelan....(sigh). And that's what this little pile represents - lots of yummy fabric that I bought with my 'birthday' money back in February when I visited Patchwork on Central Park for the very first time. I hadn't found the right project to cut into it until the other day when I was cruising quilting blog world and discovered this quilt-along that The Old Red Barn Co is hosting. Looks like fun and seeing as it's over 6 weeks, managable!

I've been working away on the red and pink zig-zag today and it's really been giving me some grief. If anything was going to go wrong, it did. Lots of broken cotton.....but that's my fault for using cheap cotton. Lesson learnt. Then there was the caught up lining. Bah! Don't you hate that? So a bit of time spent unpicking and re-doing. I think most of the problems were caused by patching a strip of batting to make it wide enough, added to the huge amount of seams, so it was possibly a bit lumpier than usual. But all that aside, the stippling is all done. Now I just need to have a stretch and a think about what the binding should be. I'll let you know.