Procrastination...

So...when I was pregnant with Jasper in 2011 I received, from the US, a rather nifty little gadget called the AccuQuilt GO! Baby fabric cutter. It's essentially a contraption that allows you to cut up to six layers of fabric with one of the dies. The die that I received with mine was the 'value die' which can cut one 4" square, one 2.5" square and two 2.5" triangles. This die also came with a pattern for making a wall hanging/lap quilt using the shapes on that particular die (with me so far?). As I'd not done any piecing before, I thought I'd follow this pattern but adapt it in order to make a full sized single bed quilt for my unborn son. This is the pattern for the original:

A number of things went wrong with this grand plan. It had started off really well - I'd selected my four fabrics and cut out some of the pieces. Wanting to get to work as soon as possible, I pieced together some of the design but quickly realised that I would soon run out of two of my fabrics. Unfortunately, I'd bought both of them some months before and I simply couldn't remember either what they were called, or where I had bought them from! It took about a month to source them, and wait for them to be delivered from overseas! By that time my pregnant tum had grown too much for me to be able to sit comfortably upright for more than a few minutes at a time (I suffer terribly with rib pain when I'm pregnant), let alone hunched over a sewing machine.

Plan B was to wait until I'd given birth - so that I could sit at my sewing machine again. I'd surely be finished in time for Jasper's first Christmas? He was born on Halloween so that gave me almost two months to finish. Unfortunately, Jasper was incredibly colicky and cried almost all of the time. So I was getting pretty much no sleep at all at night and during the day I had to carry Jasper around all the time. This didn't improve until he was about 10 weeks old. The week between Christmas Day and New Year's Day was spent with Jasper and I in hospital (he was 8 weeks old) as he'd come down with bronchiolitis. The children's ward was filled with tiny babies that had this, it wasn't pleasant! So needless to say, Jasper's quilt was not done in time and so I put it away to complete at a later date. The next year passed by in a bit of a flurry so despite my best intentions of completing the quilt for Jasper's first birthday last month, I never even got it out. Here's how far I'd got before it was put away:

Today I got it out for the first time since packing it away and took it along to my sewing club. I am determined that Jasper will have his quilt by his second Christmas! I managed to finish off the zigzag border on the right-hand side, and added two bands of squares around the outside of the whole piece. I'm thinking of using bamboo for the wadding and possibly backing it in dimple minky. That way it will be thick enough to use as a summer quilt on its own. The binding I'm not sure of yet but I will do all of that by hand. I'm not overly keen on hand-sewing but I do really like binding by hand. It's very therapeutic!