Grandmother’s Garden Doll Quilt

So I’m blogging about doll quilts a lot at the moment. I love making them and trying out different techniques. One of my favourites was the Grandmother’s Garden doll quilt. I really enjoyed working on it although the shape gave me a few headaches over  how to finish it. However, finishing off the Summer Stitching quilt gave me a few ideas which helped.

Firstly, I added a couple of green hexagons to the short sides of the quilt to make it into a rectangle.

I spent a weekend unpicking all the basting stitches and removing the papers from my hexagons. The back of the quilt is almost as interesting as the front but I’ve definitely learnt a lesson to only use the fabric I need as it was hard work removing the papers from the excess fabric!

I made a quilt sandwich using a lovely elephant print I found in a haberdashery shop in Warminster. I hand quilted the centre of each flower, I think I meant to hand tie them but unfortunately I forgot until I had already started hand quilting. The hardest part was making the edges straight as this meant cutting through hexagons! There’s something very wrong (to me) about cutting through carefully made patchwork pieces but it was great to see it finally looking like a quilt.

Then I added the brown binding which I cut by hand, and hand-stitched it on so every inch of this little quilt has been made by my fair hands.

I can’t tell you how much I love this quilt, the pattern and the colours and fabrics. If I had the time I would definitely make a full-size one for our bed. This one has been given to my daughter to play with, she’s been using it to wrap her dolly in and I hope she keeps it for a very long time.