Peacocks in the Garden – it’s finished!

Okay so after my last post whinging about having this WiP still hanging over my head… I finally got busy and unpicked the wonky quilting. Then I thought hmm, maybe the puckering is caused by lousy basting. So I rebasted it. And requilted it. Only to have the same puckering occur. Damnit! So at this point I convinced myself that vertical lines only worked perfectly. I seriously need to make friends with a long arm quilter.

Anyways, there’s more to the tale of woe but I’m not going to let it spoil the pretty. So let’s just forget the dramas this quilt caused with it’s cheeky bad behaviour in the quilting areas and enjoy how pretty it looks.



The pattern is Garden Fence by Hyacinth Quilt Designs. Gorgeous pattern and easy to do. I made mine with a charm pack of Cuzco for the centre squares. Love the peacocks and flowers in this line.



The back is pieced too. That’s a personal preference – I love a pieced back – I think it just adds something extra to the quilt. Why should the front hog all the pretty anyways?



The polka dots look quite cute too. They are a dark pink which almost matches the dark pink solid.



So the quilting is just vertical lines, through the white sashing and straight through the middle of the blocks. Very ordinary but it does the job!



I bound it with more white fabric. I found after I had quilted this for the second time, that my backing wasn’t big enough. It fit perfectly for the top half, but it seems the cut of fabric I had wasn’t exactly straight. Yeah and there was no way I was unpicking that quilting again! So I trimmed the quilt down a bit and lost some of the white border. But that’s okay. The binding being white hides it nicely.
I also tried a new binding method. Completely by accident hehe. I normally sew the binding to the back, then fold to the front and sew, which leaves a line of stitching around the edge on the back of the quilt. I don’t mind that. I claim it as a design feature.



But for some reason with this quilt, I sewed it to the front first, only realising my error when I went to sew it down. On the back. Argh! I didn’t want the line of stitching on the front. So I stitched in the ditch on the front, and managed to catch the binding (only just in some places!) on the back. I did have a couple of small areas that didn’t catch but with a touch up, everything is sewn down nicely.



Had enough of the photos of the Peacocks in the Garden quilt? I’m just showing off now because I’m so pleased it’s finished.

Linking this up with TGIFF which is over at Stop That Owl this week.


And… did you know there’s a new linky party in town?  Diane at From Blank Pages has started one to share your GunnaDo projects. Okay that’s not her word, it’s mine. You know those “I’m gunna do that project one day”. This linky party is a celebration of projects yet to be created! Do you have some of those? I have a few.

Here are my next three immediate ones. So I don’t have a lot of WiPs but I do have a lot of GunnaDos.

This one is actually printed and has the fabrics chosen to try out. A little paper pieced train to go with my transport themed patterns (you can see some of the others here)



This one is for a soon to come Blog Hop I’m joining – no more details yet but it’s going to be like totally rad!


And this one is just in quilt layout at the moment while I play around with EQ7. The lovely Marieka has offered to test it for me though so I better get a move on and make it into pattern form.



How about you? Have a yet to be created project to share and chat about? You can link it up over here!