Bloggers quilt festival- Hexxy scrap quilt

If you have come in for the bloogers quilt festival WELCOME to my little Aussie corner of blogland. Thanks for stopping by. I LOVE Bloggers quilt festival. I love visiting new blogs and checking out the quilty eye candy. I always end up with heaps of new blogs on my blog reader! Thanks Amy for hosting such a wonderful festival.

Now about my quilt. I tend to be drawn to strong gemoetrical quilt designs and love scrappy or ecclectic, sometimes even clashing fabric combinations. So its no surprise that I was drawn to a hexagon quilt I saw in a magazine that used up scraps of fabric (not long gone or I would reference it). When stumbled upon the article I had been quilting for 12 months, and I also realised this would be my 12th quilt, constructed using scraps from my previous 11 quilts. I just couldnt get past the 'completeness' of that little scenario and started work immediately.

All my fabrics (plus extra purchased fabric... I'd only been quilting a while and hadnt become overwhelmed by scraps at that point. I still laugh at the thought of having to purchase scraps for a scrap quilt!) were cut into 1.5" strips and 9 strips were randomly stiched together. The strips were then cut into equalateral triangles (8.5" from memory).

Once I had a couple of hundred of those I randomly stitched them into rows like this.

And then I stitched the rows together to create the quilt top. I started in Dec 07 and the quilt top was finished in Jan 08. The quilt was then put away until May 08 as other projects took priority.

I picked a valori Wells floral fabric for the backing as it felt like a more fluid version of the front and teamed it with a matching Valori Wells stripe for the binding. Quilting it proved to be quite a problem. There were so many seams, and to be honest, being such a novice, I didnt really press the seams properly and the result was a bubbly quilt top with lots of bulk. I decided to "knot" the quilt as there was just no way I could machine quilt it without creating puckers. Hand quilting was out of the question as, at that point, I was just too eage to get it done!

Here is the quilt just after I finished it in May 2008.

Since then we have moved house and it has a new spot on a different couch. I snapped this photo this morning for this blog entry. This is my 7 year old daughter, Matilda, enjoying some TV while snuggled under the quilt. I didnt think the knot quilting would be very robust, but 2.5 years later this quilt is still in fabulous condition. I machine wash it regularly, and sometimes even tumble dry it.