Hanky Panky

There's an attention grabbing title for you! I'm sorry, I couldn't resist.

So what feels like waaay back, last week in fact at the cottage, I started a new quilt. Oh happy days, it's that delicious giddy feeling of being free of other projects and feeling without guilt that you can start something new. The dining room was about to become my country Den.

I've had in my stash for ages, this range of fabrics by Wyndham called "The Hankie Club". It consists of a printed panel and many co-ordinating prints.

I've long loved vintage hankies, their designs are absolutely gorgeous and I have quite a collection of the real thing. Joy then when Wyndham brought out this range. The printed panel consisted of 12 square hanky designs on one large sheet (I'd guess about 44" wide but about 1.5/2 yards long), to be cut out individually. Rather lovely they are too.

I also indulged in a selection of the ditsy floral prints. Too cute!

I've been pondering for ages what to do with the hanky squares and fabric and how to turn them into a quilt. This book is extremely useful. It doesn't contain actual quilt patterns (directions and measurements how to make them) but shows you how to combine blocks and how to lay them out to create different designs. Really gets you thinking about all the possibilities.

With all those pretty fabrics at my fingertips, I settled on making traditional log cabin blocks to intersperse with the hanky squares. I did a little rudimentary maths to come up with the required strip widths to end up with the desired finished block size.

Making the 10.5" log cabin blocks was rather pleasurable and I had ten blocks made in no time. I love it when you have enough blocks to start laying them out to get a feel for the quilt.

Now I decided for this quilt to set the blocks on point (so they look like a diamond, albeit a square one). This means that you need to cut what are called setting triangles to fill in down the sides (and corner triangles too). I sadly discovered that the fabric I had left was not big enough to cut the large squares that are then cross-cut for the triangles. I decided to make more log cabin blocks, this time over 16" so they became quite time consuming (read: knackering).

So no sooner had I laboured to make these perfectly square log cabin blocks, than I did this to them. Eeek!

The furniture shifted out of the way, the sitting room became my makeshift "design floor". So exciting, laying all the blocks out!

At this point, I realised my two days of rest had been rather shattering so I packed all the blocks away and here they sit now in my Den, waiting the next stage.

Oh if only all the washing, ironing and food shopping and stuff didn't get in the way. Very irritating, don't you find!