Quilt...

Well, the exercise has been taking a bit of a back seat these last three weeks or so, which is pretty shocking.  Never going to lose the next stone if I don't get back to it, so will be back at the pool tomorrow, snow willing!  Well, that's a bit of a hope really, because although it's snowing quite heavily now, it's unlikely to get so bad as to stop me getting to the pool tomorrow, this is Edinburgh, not London!  I did try and go swimming this week, but was hampered by the queueing system at the Uni pool - they only let 30 people in at any one time, so if you go at a busy time you have to wait.  The queue was too long that I decided to try again another time.  Monday's are particularly bad apparently, so I'll just go back to my usual pool tomorrow.  

I do love the snow though - I am like a small child, getting all giggly and excited by it.  Was very jealous of all the snow down south.  I live in Scotland surely it's supposed to be worse here! 

Anyway, what I have been doing in the meantime, while not exercising, is starting work on my quilt.  I bought the fabric in the middle of last year to make a patchwork quilt and it has taken me this long to finally get round to doing anything about it.  The fact that I had to cut nearly 200 pieces out was probably a big factor putting me off...  It's an Amy Butler design and is her 'brick path' quilt from her fabulous free patterns she puts on her website (www.amybutlerdesign.com).  As well as liking the look of the finished design it appealed because I thought the structure would be easy for someone who has never made a quilt before and who is still getting to know her sewing machine.  I picked some fairly muted colours for the quilt, mostly creams with some goldy colours, but just to make it a bit more interesting there are some really nice reds in there too.  

It took me several weeks to cut all the rectangles out (mostly because it was as tedious as I had imagined it to be and back breaking stuff), but it was a fairly impressive stack of bits when I was done... 

That's them all stacked up after I undertook the mammoth task of laying them all out on the floor to work out where they should go.  As there were, I think, 7 different fabrics and the quilt is 11 rows by 18, it was important not to get two of the same piece of fabric next to each other, and also to make sure that it has an element of the eclectic about it, so that it doesn't follow too much of a prescribed pattern.  I'm very lucky that our living room has a big floorspace so I could undertake the laying out exercise being able to see the full quilt and get a sense of what the finished piece will look like:

It's a big old quilt being roughly double bed sized (it should be 72" by 72" when finished).  I pretty pleased with how it looked laid out on the floor (it took several hours to complete that).  Here's a close up of some of the fabric:

I'm particularly fond of the bits with birds on (you probably can't appreciate them in the picture), but love all the fabrics and how well it will go with whatever bed linen I put on the spare bed.  Our spare room is also the fiance's study, so anything to make it less of a work space when we have visitors is a big bonus!

I completed the laying out stage two weeks ago and now am on to the sewing stage!  I have so far completed the sewing up of the first 9 downward rows, sewing the short ends in each row together, creating 9 long strings of fabric.  I'll not sew the downward rows together until I've finished them all, but it's nice to see it starting to come together already.  Very excited to see the finished thing!