design wall

Our house will be going up for sale soon so I needed to come up with a solution to making my sewing room look more presentable. I usually have my quilt-in-progress spread out on the double bed...not very satisfactory as it not only looks messy but gets very dusty. I remembered reading about how to make a design wall in a Kaffe Fassett book. I found it the other day in Passionate Patchwork and used it as a rough guide. I bought two pieces of "foil board" from Bunning's, each measuring 107cm x 212cm, and taped them together at the back(so they're hinged) with masking tape. I covered the whole thing with white flannelette sheeting (bought by the metre at Lincraft) by just taping it on at the back. According to KF you can fold the whole thing up and slide it under a bed if you want it out of sight. Mine does stand up by itself but it's inclined to be a bit "bendy" with the weight of the current quilt on it. So I've pinned on a couple of fabric strips at the top and drawing-pinned them to the top of the picture rail.

I googled "design wall" and there are some great ideas on there, including hemming a sheet top and bottom and running 2 pieces of dowel through and suspending these from hooks.

My little room looks SO much better! I wish I'd got around to this years ago.

grandmother's flower garden quilt

I fell in love with a similar quilt of Trish Harper's when I took one of her classes ages ago at Amitie. She kindly gave me a copy of the hexagon template, and I spent hours contentedly cutting out and mixing and matching the florals. I confess that though I loved it when I started it I'm now not so fond of it. It's been spread out on the spare-room bed to remind me to finish it, but all it does is inspire feelings of guilt. The planning and buying the fabric is by far my favourite part of doing patchwork, so I'd really love to start something new with all this free time on my hands. But my conscience tells me to be disciplined and finish this first. I've only got a couple of outside rows of flowers to attach so it shouldn't take long.

I can't remember how Trish quilted hers...probably by hand. I've hand pieced the whole thing so it seems a shame not to hand quilt it. But it's a daunting prospect when I want to get on with something else.