The Freddy Quilt

​​So last week when I decided this red and white quilt needed some mad appliqué I had to come up with what it was going to be! I had in my head hat I would do a big sort of droopy coneflower, so I drew up half of what I thought (I always draw something like that in a half so that I can trace the other side out and it's symmetrical). As I work entirely by hand I just measured out a piece of paper the right size for the fabric and went from there. 

Once I had drawn it I laid it down over the quilt - nope. What I had in my head didn't work one bit. I fiddled around for a while with some other ideas and eventually hit on just your bog standard daisy shape, but I wanted it to look a bit lopsided and not perfect so I drew it all up freehand with all different petal shapes. I added some leaves and cut them out to see how they looked on the quilt. 

All happy, so I cut out each template, laminated them and traced them out! I made sure to number them all so I didn't get confused - also I never know when I might teach this quilt or do an online workshop or something, and there is nothing worse than going back to write a pattern and finding that all your templates are missing or not labelled :D I have files with everything in them, all neatly labelled and waiting. 

I laid the pieces out loosely onto the border directly to make sure they all had good contrast and the colours were balanced. As all the petals are different shapes, I didn't want to have to move them around into different spots if I didn't like the fabrics, because that would have involved recutting them. 

Once I was happy, I laid the quilt over my light pad with the drawing underneath and used it to position everything properly. I drew the stems on with pencil - the stem for the flowers goes from the border into the main body of the quilt, but I didn't want to have to appliqué onto the whole quilt for longer than I needed to, so I did all the petals first, except for the ones that were going to be stitched over the stem.

Then I sewed the top border to the quilt and stitched the stem. Once it was all done it was on again to the bottom border! The space it sat into was slightly different so I did one flower instead of two, but I like the balance.

The quilt has gone off to my amazing machine quilter to be custom quilted. I wanted to incorporate some paper dolls into the quilting, to represent the blocks that. were in the first quilt I ever made using this technique, the one that led me to my friendship with Freddy in the beginning. I sent some drawings to Kat, and this is her layout of where she's going to put them.

She has the quilt on her machine this weekend, so keep your eye on @twocatsquilts on Instagram if you want some peeks into the quilting! I can't wait to see it myself.

Happy day peeps :)

Sarah x