Quatro quilt in 'Posy Garden' | Alice turns 4

Meet my latest baby! It's been a while since I made a 'big' quilt, so when a bundle of Posy Garden arrived from Riley Blake I knew this was a collection that deserved to be made into one.

Posy Garden is the latest stunning line by fellow Riley Blake designer Carina Gardner, whom I had the great pleasure of meeting at quilt market - she is so lovely in person and her Posy Garden 'booth' (aka glamper) was so cool. It was a polka dot camper van decorated top to bottom in all these pretty fabrics!

The pattern I used for my quilt is called 'Quatro' and is by Aussie quilter and designer Keera Job of Live.Love.Sew fame. I got to know Keera via our mutual quilty circles and she has turned into a great friend in the short time that I've known her - she even did me the massive favour of doing the technical editing on my book! If like me you have a fondness for classic patterns that showcase the prints in a fabric collection, you must check out Keera's patterns - she has so many stunning ones. This one is definitely one of my favourites, it's layer cake friendly and from a distance the pattern appears to have curves (without having to actually sew any fiddly curves!).

Now, I confess this quilt was made at a snail's pace, even for me. It took me a month to piece the quilt top, and then it went to my friend Cassie from Cassandra Madge who worked her long arm quilting magic on it at lightning speed. Unfortunately due to a heavy blog tour schedule it then took me another month to bind it and then a few more weeks to eventually take some photos (I literally had to bribe my husband to hold the quilt for the first photo above!).  It's been one of those projects that I've been doing in my spare time and there has not been much of that around lately with the launch of my debut collection and book, and finishing off my next line for Riley Blake (there's a little snippet of news for you! For those of you who asked, yes, it's on its way.)

As time was a precious commodity, I decided to give machine binding a go this time as it would save so much time compared to hand-binding. I followed the excellent tutorial by Rita from Red Pepper Quilts and I surprised myself with the result! It was SO easy and SO fast - in one hour the quilt was bound and finished. I mean there are one or two places where the stitch line is not 100% perfect, but really I'm being a perfectionist. I'm never hand binding a large quilt again, I am a convert!!

In other news, this week we survived two days of severe storms in South Australia, which got so bad that a few dozen electricity towers were ripped out of the ground and the power to the entire STATE was cut off. For those of you following from the US, that's an area almost double the size of Texas! Our power finally came back after 12 hours, and life returned to normal just in time for Alice's 4th birthday. Seriously, I've no idea when this girl got so big! And don't be fooled by these sweet innocent looks, she is getting cheekier and more headstrong every day. In fact, my hubby often jokes that I have truly cloned myself in her, not only in looks but temperament also. He has two of me to contend with!

I was totally intending to bake her an awesome cake, but I came across this rainbow cake at my supermarket. Too good to resist, right? And definitely not a Pinterest fail (which my cake would've most likely ended up being!).

Boy, did we spoil her this year with this Sylvanian Families doll house. But it's already provided countless hours of 'quiet' and 'gentle' play (a rarity in this house with my two hooligans rampaging around most of the time). This tired mummy is so grateful for that. Though I find myself with another house to tidy up every few hours - all those little bits and pieces end up everywhere! But the kid in me is loving it, really, it's just an excuse for mummy to play with the doll's house.

Thank you for visiting! I still have a few advance (and signed!) copies of my book in my Etsy shop, as well as Sweet Orchard bundles, in case you missed previous post. Until next time, have a lovely week!