Farmer's Wife in Your Life

Well, I am finally ready for you to see the finished article. It is a blind runner (when I first said this to some friends they thought I was making an ode to the paralympics), but like a bed runner, it's a narrow quilt that runs along the bottom of a blind.

At the top of our stairs we have a window that looks directly into the same window in the neighbour's house. When we moved in three years ago, we put up a basic blind from Ikea, and I've regularly thought I could make something to tart it up a bit. Well the Farmer's Wife in Your Life linky party from Love Affair with My Brother was the push I needed.

From left to right: Prairie Queen, Flock, Windmill, Churn Dash, Windblown Square and Linoleum.
I measured and did some maths, then pulled out the book and picked six of my favourites which I felt I could work out the rotary cutting measurements for. Most of the blocks I've already made I've done using foundation piecing, and I wanted to try accurate piecing, as I've been getting better!
Then onto colour. Our stairs and landing is a mixture of white, cream and magnolia (it was the one room we didn't redecorate when we moved in) so I could have picked absolutely anything. And for some reason I had blue and white stuck in my head. I briefly thought about a rainbow, but kept coming back to blue and white. I think it's because our LQS has had a beautitful striped blue fabric in for ages that I've been desperately trying to find a use for. This was only the second "quilt" where I've used a white background. When I first started my main quilt I spent over an hour trying to decide if I would put the batiks I'm using with black or white. I'm really glad I went with black, but it was nice to try white. The white I used is a calico, and quite a loose weave, so I chose to bind it before I quilted it. This was the project where I decided to attack one of my new year's resolutions and learn to put on binding totally by machine. It worked! And I love the effect of the top stitches - I think this may become my standard finish to a quilt! I didn't use wadding as I didn't want it to be too heavy on the blind.
I hand quilted in a bright blue perle cotton - I rocked the needle and everything - it's so much easier without wadding.

I think this is my favourite of the six blocks. I love Churn Dash and I got to use some scraps of Happy Mochi Yum Yum left over from my Swoon Quilt and a gorgeous Tilda fabric I picked up because I loved it. You can also see the binding here. When I got it home I realised that the stripes on the binding fabric go the other way to most stripes, so rather than cutting across the width of the fabric, I had to cut along the length to get the effect I wanted. I'd only bought 30cm so the binding is made from ten pieces..... luckily because of the pattern you can't see the joins!
At the moment the finished piece is just pinned to the bottom of the blind, but when I have some time next week and fancy a good fight, I've got some velcro. That way, when I want a change, I can just make another one!

Just to finish up, on a non-stitchy note, tomorrow is my Mum's "significant" birthday party, and we had a cake made for her:

Isn't it stunning! It's also enough to feed an army!

Happy Stitching