Show’n’tell day - what a scramble!. I’m lucky I’m currently on holiday. Now, before I go any further, I want to say, my intentions were honourable, I really was going to have a lot of fun with everyone’s blocks, putting them together to make an awesome quilt. The reality has been somewhat more fraught, and I haven’t even finished all my own blocks. The reason is …. I think I got a bit excited about the possibilities.

One of the reasons I really like doing this bloghop is because it challenges you to think outside what you normally do and the more I got into nursery rhymes, the more I keep seeing the possibilities and wanting to make more. Unfortunately, we all only have 24 hours in a day and apparently it just isn’t enough.

So what have I actually done. Well, I decided I would just finish up the ones I had started, then whip up a few more blocks from everyone else’s great patterns, then ….. yeah, well. So I made a good start. I made backgrounds for Humpty Dumpty and the man with seven wives (from St Ives). I printed the patterns and started doing the fusible for Humpty Dumpty. That was fun.

But then, yes, you guessed it, I got distracted because I kept thinking about the wall. In the 30 x 30 version I used preprinted bricks, but I actually wanted to make a wall. I figured that if I pressed all my seams towards the bricks, I could quilt the mortar in the ditch and make the bricks pop out. (Yeah!)

But as I did it, I also decided I don’t like walls that cut right across the quilt blocking out the background, so I decided to add a couple of fancy pillar columns to the ends of my wall (heh heh). This left me with more Humpty Dumpty and guardsmen appliqué to do. I really didn’t want to put the figures in front of my nice columns. And I wanted to keep Humpty centred. So I relocated the guardsmen.

So now, I had two 30 x 30 quilts and one 30 x 12 quilt and a background and a couple of blocks. I decided I really had better finish something. Except I’d moved the right hand horse further into my Humpty Dumpty 30 x 30 picture because he had lovely swishy tail which I didn’t want to cut off. But this left me with a gap on the right hand side, so I dug into my stash and added some sheep and farm buildings from on old novelty print. This filled in my glaring gap and gave something in the middle ground which helps with the perspective. So I was pretty happy with the sheep and buildings.

(OK, this blog post is now late due to incredibly windy weather and a resultant power cut, sorry everyone….. AAARGH I had just finished writing all the words when the power went out and I lost it all.)

The advantage of doing the appliqué for both Humpty Dumpty quilts together was overall fewer thread changes, even though it meant double the figures. I completed the appliqué, added the borders, made the backings, pieced my leftover wadding and was all ready to pin and quilt when I remembered the guardsmen. They needed buttons and chinstraps …. A few French knots later and I was ready to pin again.

I kept the quilting pretty simple because it really isn’t the hero of this piece, and I tried to keep it linked to the theme. So I outlined all the appliqué and ditched around every brick in the pieced wall. This made me very happy because the bricks just popped out in a very satisfactory way. I added sheep tracks for the sheep and cloud shapes in the sky and a few contours in the mountains.

The next issue was the binding. I decided to do a flange binding that you can just machine sew, by sewing it firstly to the back and then folding it to the front and sewing in the ditch of the flange. The colour that looked best for ‘Over the hills and far away’ was a multicolour stripe. Now, I love stripes set across the binding, I think they look great, but I only had a small amount left. I finished the binding with one cm of fabric left over! Happiness!

For the green border on Humpty Dumpty I used red which is complementary to the green and picks up the colours of the guardsmen’s uniforms, but for the blue border, the colour that looked good was a natural tone picking up the eggshell, and natural stone colours. The complement of blue is orange and so the brown/coffee tones work well.

If you would like to purchase any of my patterns, do check out my pattern store. And do leave me a comment. I love feedback. It makes bloghops so much fun.

Now, I do want to make my remaining blocks into a quilt with the wonderful blocks everyone else has come up with, but sadly it’s going to be too late for show’n’tell. But do look at the wonderful show’n’tell from the other designers.

Show and Tell's Featured Projects

Just Let Me Quilt
Words & Stitches
Duck Creek Mountain Quilting
Ursula Prandtstetter at Tuning My Heart Quilts
Elizabeth Coughlin Designs
Linda B Creative
Charlie???s Daughter at Bobbin In Quilts
Seams To Be Sew - Layout Tutorial

And of course we have more wonderful giveaways which you can enter.

Firstly, a $100 gift certificate from C & T publishing. If you win this you will receive a coupon code by email.

Secondly, two great bundle of fabric from Northcott (one for each of two winners):