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Saturday, January 4, 2014

Charmalade Quilt

Well I thought I better start as I mean to go! Two posts in two days isn't too shabby is it?  


About a year ago in the midst of all our renovations work my daughter picked out some really pretty fabric for me to make a quilt out of for her: Sakura Park from Moda.  Fast forward a few months and we decided upon a pattern to go with: Charmalade at Moda Bake Shop by Pamela Lincoln.  Then fast forward to November last year and I tried to get the fabric.  Note to self, when you see fabric you like: buy it! Oh boy was it hard to track down the fabric I needed.  It came in from America, Australia and the UK in the end! 


It was a bit of a tall order to make my first quilt that is bigger than a baby quilt in 3 weeks in time for Christmas but I did it! And totally love it! The quilting could be better as always and one of the rows of piecing just doesn't match up but oh well, I still love it!


The Charmalade pattern calls for Moda Snow charm squares, but as I wasn't using the Marmalade fabric line I wasn't sure how Snow would match in with the Sakura Park, so instead I decided to wait til it arrived and trot down to my local quilting shop to find a match.  It just meant cutting 65 charms! Drum roll please....enter the Sizzix Bigz 5 inch square die!  This was great for ensuring accuracy and saving my hand using the rotary cutter!  Not much wastage either which was a bonus.


Although my hand didn't escape the rotary cutter completely as there sure is a lot of trimming to do in this project, 130 squares!


I decided I would not be able to the beautiful fancy quilting that was on the one in the tutorial.  So instead I opted for mostly straight (ish) line quilting with some meandering loops around the edge.  I love the tutorial, very easy to follow and the pattern looks really striking.



The quilting wasn't totally without mishaps! This happened on a couple of occasions and there was much muttering of expletives going on in our house!!


I couldn't get as much fabric as I needed for the back to be all one colour so instead I opted to put a strip of different fabric down the middle.


Really love how on the back the quilting really stands out.


I put a label on the back with a photo of our little family.


 Here's a few more gratuitous photos!


By the way, the fabric line also contained a blue range of the fabrics but I took those out and used them on another project to be blogged later!



Thanks to Pamela for producing a really great tutorial!

Sharing this at Classy Clutter!  And at Sew Can She.  Sharing at Quilt Story too!

Fresh Poppy Design

9 comments:

  1. Absolutely beautiful quilt! I hadn't seen that pattern before, so I'm off to Pin it! Love the fabric ~ and I know how hard it is sometimes to find older collections. Thank goodness for our online community!

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  2. It turned out awesome Jo!! You did a great job. Jade will treasure this forever, I'm sure. Wondering where the blues were used for 😉.

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  3. A beautiful quilt! My grandmother quilted, I remember her hand sewing all the pieces together...quilts are hard work,and an act of love, yours is beautiful! Found you through Spotlight Saturday linky party.

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  4. It's beautiful! Love the fabrics!

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  5. Lovely quilt. I too have learned, buy when you see. That is why I have such a gigantic stash. :-)

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  6. Argh, my comment disappeared. Here goes again. Lovely quilt. I too have learned about how hard to buy fabric later. So I buy it when I see it and like it. Two problems with that. I don't always like it till I get home. And it grows my stash. (My apologies if you end up with this comment twice.)

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  7. Pink and green and white look so pretty together. This quilt is lovely.

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  8. YAY! This is beautiful and you should be very proud of it!! I'm also glad you liked the tutorial. I had fun making it as well.

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It makes my day to hear your comments, thanks so much for taking the time to leave a message! Jo :o)