It looks like all things are hotting up for the Royal Wedding tomorrow – apart from the weather, it was spring like on my way to work this moring and we had summer weather for the Easter weekend. As an aside it was also really quiet travelling to work – I had seats on both trains and the tube this morning, unheard of generally!

How are you preparing for the big day? Are you getting into all the build up? I had thought it was pretty much passing me by, until I realised I was writing a blog post about it.. I’ve obviously absorbed more than I’d thought!

We have the Royal wedding memorabilia I bought Little Ted the [Happy land Royal wedding set](http://www.elc.co.uk/HappyLand-Royal-Wedding-Set/131121,default,pd.html) and spent 10 minutes hunting round Morrisons for a droppped Duke of Edinburgh on Monday.

I bought tea towels as gifts for an upcoming trip to the States. Our local charity shop is selling them and as I was leaving I spotted a rack of men’s shirts for £2 each, it didn’t take long to find 5 which were 100% cotton and added straight into my stash for quiting! I have my eye on a pattern for quilted pot holders from an old issue of Sew I love the idea of recylcing in this way. My Mum is making a quilt for my nephew with a pair of my pyjamas and a pilfered shirt from my Brother-in-Law’s wardrobe..

We’re even going to a street party tomorrow – not our street, we’ll be gate crashing a friend’s.. taking a picnic and hoping the weather cheers up!

I am looking forward to seeing the dress, I’m surprised at how well the secret is holding up, though it has to be a British designer right?? It would be great if there was a ‘making of the dress’ documentary.

Speaking of dresses, the BBC have a [lovely slide show of Royal wedding dresses](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13207649). The oldest is Princess Charlotte’s dress from 1816 they have the artwork from the wedding as well – obviously no photos back then!

While looking for photos to illustrate this post I stumbled across [this amazing embroidery pattern](http://thehappyzombie.com/blog/?p=471) from the happy zombie to comemorate the day. The Flickr page has all rights reserved so you’re going to have to follow the link – trust me it’s worth it!

Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think.. I just saw that my last blog post (of 14th February) gave me no more excuses for not blogging – I now have wordpress on my phone and everything!

I’m back at work now 3 days a week, which is actually giving me a nice work/life balance. I have Tuesdays and Fridays off, which I would highly recommend! It’s lovely to break up the week and still get a long weekend!

In my absence from my blog I have been working hard on Little E’s quilt. I didn’t quite get it finished before I was back at work, but was just finishing the binding. I spent so long focussing on finishing the pieces for the front that I didn’t even consider how it would all fit together!

Luckily Mum came to stay while we were having settling in days at nursery and she did a great job at distracting me from missing my little guy! We dropped him off that first morning and drove straight to my local quilting shop to buy supplies..

Most of the techniques you need for finishing a quilt are easily found on YouTube and as this was a first attempt I won’t pretend to give a tutorial here! I will however lay out the steps for finishing up – I had no idea what was involved:

1, piece blocks of quilt together

2, create sashings/borders as required, to get a lovely join Mum showed me how to do this by laying the 2 strips right sides facing and at right angles

machine stitch together across the diagonal
iron open and trim the join down to a quarter inch

3, tack together the backing, wadding and top – this is a huge job, tacking in lengths every 10/15 cm down the quilt ( I did it in thirds) to avoid any wrinkles in step 4

4, quilt – I used the machine to stitch in the ditch around some of my blocks, as they were pretty uneven in size to begin with I just picked them at random. I also did some hand quilting around a couple of the big chicks in my biggest block – just to hold it firm. Apparently there is a proportion which should be quilted, but Mum couldn’t remember and Google didn’t help on that occasion!

5, binding, which comes in parts
a. prepare the length of binding, I used the odds that were left and joined in the same way as with sashings, this is ironed in half and
b. machine stitch raw edges together – so sewing through both edges of the binding, the top of the quilt, the wadding and the backing (in that order – so binding on top). Tricky bits include corners – drop the needle a quarter inch from the end and turn the quilt round; and joining the ends up – this was the bit that I’m still not clear on – I fudged it a bit, it looks OK – I’m sure Little E won’t notice! But I will do a practise before I attempt this again on a quilt!
c. hand stitch the binding round to the backing to hide those raw edges

6, pull out all the tacking threads – very therapeutic. I guess this could be done before the binding, but I love the dramatic big reveal so held off until it was finished! Drum roll please…

So proud, you get two photos! – I bought the fabric for this quilt in October 2010, I then left it in the paper bag and got it out every so often to look at – I was so scared of starting and getting it wrong! There were a few mistakes – I ironed the bondaweb to the wrong side of the fabric I had chicks facing in the wrong direction, but all in all I’m very pleased with my first quilt!

As the end of my maternity leave looms, Little E has had a few trips to nursery – leaving me with a bit of time on my hands. The first trip was half an hour and I sat in the lobby of the nursery reading a book and jumping every time someone walked down the corridor. The second I left him for an hour and made it as far as the neighbouring leisure centre for a coffee and a read – finally finished Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth by the way, a long read (over a month – unheard of for me!) but well worth the effort. As both sessions went so well today he was there for 2 hours over lunch time and I came home and had an hour and a half with the chicken quilt. So nice to have uninterrupted time to get the machine and ironing board out, especially during the day when I have the energy to do anything!
The photo at the top of the post shows the quilt as it was the last time I blogged..

I finished the last piece off last week (above) – I love the spotty Moda fabric used as the green background and in red as the legs and beak – I’m going to go by backing for the quilt next week and I think that the red spotty would be a good choice, if they still have it in stock..
(The red thread in the photo is the amount of floss I had left – I was worried that I wasn’t going to make it!)

The quilt falls into three pieces which are each sewn together – I used my new quilting foot to get 1/4inch seams – and ironing each piece and seam as I go – I ironed the fabric over to one side and then turned over and ironed the seam from the front as well – I’m not sure if that’s a really obvious thing to do but the second ironing really seemed to make a difference so thought I’d mention it! The 3 panels are going to be joined by strips of fabric which I’ll need to piece together from my left over fabric, so I’m hoping for a good long nap over the weekend so I can get a bit further..

My parents visited last week, I very proudly laid out the quilt I’m making for Edward, telling them I had almost finished the last block. Then I noticed the hole, I’m a square missing.. The photo that came with the directions has a cushion on it covering the area of the quilt in question. However when I blogged about the quilt last year I found this photo online

When I revisited the photo to illustrate my point in this blog post, I realised that it has the square on it (the chick in the bottom right corner), which begs the question why don’t they use this photo on the front of the directions??

Apart from that small point – and you do get the size of the square in the pattern so could have chosen what to do if I hadn’t found the second photo – I’ve found it all straight forward so far, I hadn’t done much appliqué before, after a bit of research I decided that using bondaweb to fix the shapes in place and hand stitching them on using blanket stitch would be the easiest.. I know that machine stitching would be quicker but I prefer hand stitching and have more control over hand stitching than I have over my machine. If I’m honest I’m still a bit scared of the machine, but it won’t be long now till I finish the blocks off and have to get stitching my first quilt together!

I’m now starting to get some time to myself, of course I’m spending it making things for Little Ted! Here’s his new hat, the same pattern as the cot blanket, I’ve really enjoyed the cable.

I’m also working on quilt number 1 (of 2), I have 3 panels left to applique before I can start sewing it together. It was my birthday last weekend and after a trip to a local farm shop and a hair cut, I got the rest of the day setting up another block..

I’m up to a post a month – not bad considering short and sweet I’m afraid, Little Boy is asleep and dinner is calling..