Progress - a quilt top!

So....I did say that I would have a quilt top to show you last Wednesday. It's now Saturday (or most probably Sunday by the time I click "publish"). The thing is I did actually make the quilt top on Tuesday (come on it was only three seams! ) and I was going to link up to WIP Wednesday at freshly pieced but she didn't put the linky up! So I didn't bother posting. Bad me.

So, hey! better late than never:

I've just remembered how awful these pictures were - I'm sorry, I live in Wales and the weather's terrible. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it. (it's got nothing to do with my useless photography skills honest!)

As I said it only has three seams - I decided that I would keep the piecing simple and go mad on the quilting!  This is really stupid considering I've only ever quilted three quilts! (One by hand and two by machine) I need to appliqué the baby's name under the houses and then I thought that I would quilt a sun using yellow thread, some clouds using white thread and a blue meander in between for the sky! (I might throw in some black birds as well) I've read a lot of blogs in the last few weeks and I haven't seen anything like this on any of them;  I don't know if this is because it just isn't fashionable or because it just looks incredibly tacky!

I've also realised that although a lot of quilts end up being gifts for new babies hardly any of them have the baby's names on them! Again why? I love the things that my daughters receive with their names on them (love spoons, money boxes etc) but most of them are things that stay up on a shelf, don't get used etc. My daughter has enjoyed watching me make her quilt, coming home from school to see another little bit done but nothing got the same reaction has seeing her name on it!

The reason why I wanted to make the quilt top was to see how big it was so that I could order the backing fabric. It ended up being 35" x 44" but this is mainly because I found a spare piece of wadding of that size and 'waste not want not' and all that! So I went on to order the Summersville print for the backing (but from fabricHQ in the end as they had an even better sale on!) and decided to go for stitch square orange from Micheal Miller for the binding. (A few other bits might have found their way into my basket but shhhhh don't tell anyone!) I placed the order very late on Tuesday night and was very pleased when the fabric arrived on Thursday morning - good shipping time!

I had some help opening the mail!

mmmmm that looks tasty (everything goes in the mouth these days - don't worry I rescued the fabric just in time!)

left to right -Stitch Square in Orange by Michael Miller. Coastal Flower in Cornflower Blue, Bella by Lotta Jansdotter.  Happy Home utensils by Robert Kaufman and Town in Seafoam by Lucie Summers

But I've put all these away and am going back to my WIP list and going to try work through them in the right order!

I've done some work on Cara's quilt and Get Shirty but you'll have to wait for another post for pics of these as it's a Bank Holiday weekend here and I really should go to bed so that I can do more of this kind of thing tomorrow ....

First time on a swing - loved it!

More on this on Monday (or maybe Tuesday)

Enjoy the rest of your weekend (I understand that it's a long Weekend in America too) and I might see you next week! (no promises though)

**Edited to correct typo's that show you really shouldn't click 'publish' at 2.30am!

Linking up to Sunday Stash at Finding Fifth.

Please note this is the first time that I have linked up to a linky party and I can't for the life of me work out out to add the button to my blog post (not the side bar) If anyone has managed to read down this far I would really appreciate any advice you could give me regarding this.

Thanks