As many of you know i'm a sewer of handbags these days, before that it was clothing but a quilter I am not! I did dabble in a tiny bit of patchwork when I was a teenager many many moons ago .. a block here or there but nothing spectacular.

I have long admired Stacey’s quilts though and have often wondered how hard could it be to make a quilt? So when Stacey asked for volunteers to sew a design from her new book Child’s play quilts, I decided now was the perfect time for me to find out exactly how difficult it was and give sewing some patchwork a go! BTW Stacey is giving away a copy of her book (scroll to the bottom for details) but if you can't wait.. her book is available on Amazon or for a signed copy head over to her Etsy shop here Stacey Day Quilt on Etsy

I fell in love with a lot of the quilts in the book.. here are just a couple of my favourites.

Baby Shower - Photo courtesy of C&T Publishing

Whirling - Photo courtesy of C&T Publishing

There are 20 quilt designs in the book and with them all being as gorgeous as these it was to super hard to choose. In the end Prism's simple piecing won for me.

So as I said I’m a pretty much a beginner when it comes to patchwork so it was pretty nerve wracking deciding on a colour scheme. Tula Pink AllStars that arrived last month made it a little easier for me to decide though as i've been dying to make something with them since they arrived! Using the colour and tone suggestions in the pattern I found a combination of AllStars that spoke to me with one change.. instead of cream as suggested for the background colour I opted to go full on bright and use the Aqua PomPom, Raccoon in Poppy and Owls in Forget-me-not instead. To help me keep track of my choices I made a list on each template of the number needed of each colour/print got to work cutting them out.

Then the sewing could begin.. you start at the top left and work your way diagonally across in strips joining all the diamonds together. When you have the diagonal strips sewn together you then sew each of the strips together matching the seams as you go.

I learnt that sometimes things look very strange indeed when matching seams but when the seams are pressed open it all looks correct.

By the way when you get going it all comes together very quickly and suddenly it starts looking like this!

Next up was making the quilt sandwhich, I decided to use the warm and plush Stacey mentioned as I prefer cotton to polyester. After making sure all the layers were smooth and pinned securely into place it was time to quilt. I don't have a long arm machine and wasn't feeling brave enough to drop my feed dogs for some freehand meandering so I opted for stitching in the ditch of all my diamonds. The bonus of not too doing too much quilting meant the resulting handle of the quilt is soft and squishy.. not stiff at all. My quilt edges were still straight all around so I luckily didn't need to do any squaring off, just had to trim off the excess batting and backing fabric around the whole quilt. Unfortunately my table wasn't quite big enough to lay it out flat so the floor became my new best friend for getting this bit done.

The final stage left to do was the binding. I went with Stacey's full proof easy binding (instructions in the book). After a few false starts I found switching to my #10 edge stitch foot and moving my needle position slightly to the right helped enormously with lining up the edge of my binding and sewing it on straight... then I was done!

So here it is... my very first patchwork quilt!

Thanks to hubby for patiently holding it outside in freezing temperatures so I could get some straight on daylight photos <3 you :)

Our youngest has tested it out and so far it looks like a hit.. she is especially loving the super soft n smooth Tula Pink Freefall quilt backing!

Don't forget to enter the GIVEAWAY!
For your chance to win your own copy of Child's Play Quilts follow these 3 easy steps!
1. Follow me here on my blog
2. Follow Stacey day on her blog (here)
3. Comment on Stacey's blog post

The winner will be drawn on April 21st.

Want to see more? Check out the rest of the book tour schedule below!