Rory's Baby Quilt

Yesterday afternoon I finished the quilt.

I have to say I am pretty happy with how it turned out in the end. There was a time during the sewing precess when I was worried that it might look horribly distorted.

This is only the second time I properly quilted after my first experience dampened down my enthusiasm: It was my very first patchwork quilt that I was making for Adrian's first nephew Dara. While I should have picked something simple, being me, I designed something with hearts and circles that I wanted to outline with quilting stitches. I've always enjoyed embroidering and I thought quilting would be very much like it. But far from it! The wadding was very thick and my embroidery hoop kept sliding off, but even when I managed to keep it on, the reverse side looked completely crooked: a circle on the front got distorted into some wonky egg. In the end I managed to make it look kind of right but it took a lot of time and tears (and swearing).

After this I opted for crochet blankets for the next babies and when I ventured another quilt for my nephew Emil I just knotted the layers together. But after five years I decided to give it another try. Again I used the same thick wadding as I still had plenty of it.

Yet I went for an easy design and decided to just quilt along the seams avoiding any curved lines. I also ditched the embroidery hoop which worked out great for me. The quilting didn't go smoothly and there were a lot of wonky lines on the back that I had to undo and redo. But I found that it was easier when I got into a flow of stitching and didn't worry too much about how it looked on the back. 

Not perfect but not terrible either! And Aidan liked the soft wadding.

While the fabric did pucker up a lot, or was stretched too tight in places while I was quilting, it didn't matter in the end. I actually like the three-dimensional look.

As for the edging I meant to do a bias binding but had trouble choosing the fabric. Luckily I visited my aunt in Germany who had just finished an amazing huge quilt. I noticed that for the edging she had just turned over the backing fabric and stitched it to front. She argued that this version is time- as well as fabric-saving - perfect for me! And I like that you can see the backing fabric on the front now as well.

I am itching to do another quilt now!

Gloves

As an admirer of fashions in the past I'm always looking at ways to incorporate details from bygone eras into my everyday wear without looking dressed up. A great way to do this is to use accessories and if you ever had a look at one of my online shops you might have noticed that I have a mild obsession with gloves.

In the last few years I've crocheted several pairs, usually fingerless. When I'm happy with how they look they end up in my shop. There are still a few decent ones that I could wear myself, but I rarely do. Up to the middle of the 20th century no lady would have ventured out without hat and gloves and while I love the idea of being pernickety with your clothes I can't be bothered too much about them these days. After all it's no use donning gloves when you're wearing old jeans and a t-shirt, you want just a little bit of coordination.

There is something to be said for the casualness of modern clothing and I am glad that I can go out of the house without spending hours getting dressed. But at the same time I do deplore the absence of elegance in most of our clothes. Now and then I enjoy being fussy about what I wear. 

Recently I had an opportunity to wear gloves at my cousin's wedding. I wore a fifties' style dress with the little white crochet gloves in the first picture. Of course I don't have a photo...

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