I’ve just finished teaching my first Beginner’s Quilting course at The Stitchery here in Glasgow.  Over the course of 9 nights I had 6 ladies creating their first quilts, and 4 of them had time for a wee bonus project of their choosing at the end.  They created giant starflower block quilts, and each of them chose a quilting design to finish things off.

This was Paula’s quilt – she finished first, despite never having sewn before.  She went for a diagonal quilting design which was originally going to be diamonds, but as the spacer bars on the walking feet weren’t very long it took a good 6 hours worth of class time just to complete one direction, so we decided diagonal looked just fine!  She’s now bought her first sewing machine and has started getting addicted to fabric sites online, so I’ve given her a hefty shove down the slippery slope to quilting mania I think!  She’s also a bit camera shy ;o)

Dorothy was the next finisher, and in fact she and Paula ended up with the same quilting design.  Sitting opposite each other there was much hilarity as they battled to get their quilting done without crashing into each other!  She’s also a bit camera shy, but I’m looking forward to seeing her again at the next session later this year:

Helene decided to go for a circular quilting option, and she did a fabulous job of it don’t you think?  She was the only one to head down this particular route, and it was interesting to see at the end how each person wished they’d tried another person’s option for something, be it quilting or fabrics, so I guess they’ll all have to make another one now!  I promise she’s not fuzzy in real life, but it was much darker on our last night due to the rain outside.

Next we had Janice.  Poor Janice had the incredible shrinking quilt due to a few cutting challenges, but one of the good things about this block is that it’s infinitely adaptable to this sort of issue!  After missing a couple of weeks through work, Janice chose a less time consuming straight line option, with a simple grid going along the vertical/horizontal seam lines and then another line through the middle of each section.  It’s a wee bit scrumpled here after she completed the binding at home and it was folded up on its trip into the studio, but it’s normally flat, I promise!

Then we had Marianne, who ploughed on with the quilting at home to get her diamond quilting completed, doesn’t it look fab?  Marianne chose fabrics from Cath Kidston, which was when we found that her fat quarter bundles aren’t even fat quarters of a yard, as a number of the prints were nearer the 17″ mark in length.  This required a little size adjustment for her blocks, but it was plain sailing from there:

Finally we had Mary, however she unfortunately also had to miss a couple of weeks and didn’t quite get her binding finished by the end of class, so I wasn’t able to get a photo, but I’m sure the finished result will look great.

I’m looking forward to our next course starting in a couple of months, where I’ll hopefully see some of these lovely ladies again.