After doing the crazy patchwork upholstery and pouffe, I decided I must give machine block patchwork a try, I found a method on
Missouri Star Quilt company video, and chose a 9 patch swap, I really like their video's, very user friendly with easily achievable results.
I used a mixture of old charity shop clothes and fat quarters for the quilting, an old duvet cover for the backing and as I couldn't afford a 'proper' wadding I bought cheap mattress toppers for the inner.
I wasn't really happy with the brightness so I tried another one, the patchwork is entirely fat quarters, so much more expensive than the previous quilt, again I used an old quilt cover for the backing & the tesco double mattress topper for the wadding. I like it a lot, it's quite pretty and feminine.
Number 3 quilt is quite different.
I found a method for making a quilt out of second hand men's shirt from
I trawled round the local charity shops & bought 7 men's shirts, they averaged about £5 each, so even with the cheap tesco mattress topper as wadding and sheeting for backing the quilt didn't turn out as cheap as i'd liked.
In conclusion, they were good fun to make but unless i'd got a huge stash of old clothes not economic. I was disappointed with the 7 shirt one, not the finished result, I love it, but the fact that the shirts from charity shops were not 'bargains'. (I will probably have a moan about Charity Shops in a future post!)
The other important element was the need to buy a rotary cutter, not fun to cut 2" strips with scissors, the couple of decent rulers designed for patchwork I bought were invaluable, though I initially bought a metric one (as we are metric these days in the UK) but most of the best sites to follow were US based and they, of course, still work in inches. Maths is not my best skill so converting all the patterns & methods from imperial to metric was not do-able.
On the whole though a great project - I shall be making some more in the future.
