During lockdown I started on a new creative project to cheer myself up and help me keep busy, and five months later I have finally finished it! An appliqué quilt, but as I already have a winter quilt for my bed, I wanted to make it into a really bright, colourful, summer duvet cover instead. 

I spent ages deciding on the pattern I wanted to use, and finally discovered this gorgeous pattern by Laura Heine.

It’s a paper-piecing technique where you cut out the shapes using the template provided (its the same template for every square) and then use double-sided sticky paper (fusible web as it’s often known) to iron it into place on the fabric. Then I sewed around all the edges to hold them in place and stop any fraying.

Some parts I had to stitch by hand (I HATE those parts!)

And then as it grows bigger, deciding on colour combinations and layout….

As you can see I deviated from the pattern somewhat and added in some birds and embroidered patches as well.

Once it was all sewn together and I’d decided on layout, I had to attach it to the duvet cover. This turned out to be hugely complicated. If it was a quilt, I’d have laid it onto the wadding and backing and stitched it all together, and then trimmed the edges, but as this had to go onto a duvet cover it had to be straight, and I couldn’t pin it to the bottom layer!

I tried laying it out on the floor and pinning it, but all the pins kept falling out, and it was just so huge and heavy!

Then I tried draping it over the stairs so i could loosely sew it on.

Every time I got to the machine it had worked it’s way wonky and was looking terrible. I was pretty annoyed after all that hard work that I couldn’t get it to sew on straight, so in the end I cheated slightly and paid a lovely local dressmaker to finish it off for me. And I love it!