doily quilt

So, this is what has become of my doily collection. Thirty-five sets of nine squares each, destined to become a nine-patch quilt for baby bear.

It all started with this book - Make Your Own Contemporary Quilts. Have I mentioned this book before? I love this book. It is full of really fantastic ideas for making quilts, some very simple, some incorporating more traditional patchwork piecing and appliqué techniques. Plus a really good techniques section. The quilt in this book that really caught my eye and my imagination was one named Oxfam Flowers, referring to the British charity organisation.

I love needlework and I love embroidery although it's not something at which I have really tried my hand. I also haven't really tried my hand at patchwork finding it often a bit, well, twee. But the idea of incorporating all of those stitches and motifs into one quilt set me to work. And of course, I love the idea of making something new out of something old.

I am going with a different quilt design to that in the book - alternating squares of white and embroidered fabrics, each square made up of nine patches. For the white squares I am using both the leftover fabric from the cut-up doilies and patches cut from all-white doilies. It's going to be quite a challenge now to decide upon a balanced layout - so many colours, so many designs and so many shades of white to boot. Then there'll be the sewing, then a border maybe, then the batting, the backing, the quilting ... oops, ahead of myself. Layout first.