Flower Fairies Quilt and Spring time wanderings.

 Thanks for joining me again, I know it has been a while!
I have been busy completing a Flower Fairies quilt for Little Sparkles 2nd birthday. They say that you should always sew badly, it is the best way to learn... well I can't say I agreed with that before...but it turned out ok in the end...

Snowball blocks.

I started by using 12 inch blocks and sewing 3 inch plain squares diagonally onto the corners. Then trimmed leaving a quarter inch seam allowance before pressing open.  

Pinwheels out of the scraps trimmed from the corners of the snowball block.

I hate wasting any bits of fabric (hubby hates that I hate wasting scraps of fabric because I do have quite a few scraps now!) so I decided to make some pinwheels from the cut off corners. I didn't know at this stage that I would be using them on this particular quilt but we will get to that. I joined two lots of five snowball blocks together in strips for either side of the main panel.

A while ago a friends lovely mum kindly passed this Flower Fairy panel along to me and luckily it matched the fabric that I already had pretty nicely. 

I joined my layers together so next, the fun bit I thought! I happily quilted the main panel first because it was in the middle of the quilt and you should work towards the edges to prevent puckering...

How to fabric origami your quilt.

Yes, well. I flipped it over to have a look (after sewing all of it naturally). Something had gone a bit wrong. A bit very wrong. It looked like a chicken had had a go a fabric origami whilst I had been merrily sewing it all down. There are no chickens in my craft room though, so regrettably this must have been my fault. Hmmmm. So anyway, I think what happened is that I didn't have my backing fabric stretched tight enough when I was pinning it all together. That or I didn't use enough pins. 

Was I going to unpick it all and start again? Hahahahaha! Good one. No.

I used up the rest of my fabric and those nifty little pinwheels to make a 'chicken origami concealing panel' and hand sewed this over the top making sure I tucked and stuffed all the loose fabric and puffy bits behind it. 

Front view of quilt

Back (or y'know, second front view) of quilt with cheeky child.

So hurrah! Now it is a double sided quilt and much more fun! There, it isn't always so bad to sew badly.

We have also been enjoying our woodland walks as the weather is gradually getting warmer as we move into Spring.

Evening at Lepe Beach and Country Park.

Pretty sunset clouds

We had a short explore at Marchwood footpath.

Hello Mr Pheasant!

 We had some lovely sunshine in the garden so the girls made a Unicorn potion. This had to be left overnight. (Big Sparkle then woke me up at 6am the following morning to ask if she could look out of my window as she couldn't see it from her own.)

Crocuses are coming out.

 And we discovered Blackwater Arboretum. It was really beautiful here and the girls loved it. We actually arrived a little late in the afternoon so we came back the next day for a Mothering Sunday walk with a flask and little picnic!

Spring flowers.

 I'm looking forward to seeing all the new flowers emerging soon. My craft room is having a bit of a make over as we had a leak last year so it is having a fresh coat of paint. Hopefully it wont be too long before I can get crafting again.

See you soon, love Amber xxx