You might have seen this quilt in my Instagram feed, but I’m posting a few in progress shots of my Cotton + Steel Quilt here for y’all! When Ms Midge announced the Cotton + Steel charm swap, I jumped straight in. I love the Cotton + Steel range and thought this was a wonderful way to get my hands on 112 different charm squares from the range. For this quilt I used 110 of them. Thanks to the hubby for being my quilt holder at 8am this morning so I could take some quick snaps.

I couldn’t help myself and sorted them into colour order as soon as they arrived. Everything should be in colour order! I wasn’t quite sure what to do with them, but I knew I didn’t want to cut them up. After playing around for a bit, I ended up with a chromatic grid. I had to keep standing on a chair to take a photo which really helped identify any blocks that needed moving. I left it laid out on the floor for a few days and tweaked it a couple more times.

I had this great idea to put a border around my backing with strips of solids echoing the colours around the quilt. As any experienced quilter will know (not me) that makes lining up your quilt sandwich all the more tricky and means your basting has to stop ANY shifting of the top. Note to self: Don’t do this again!

I have made two attempts at quilting this and both have caused the top to shift. Not happy! After many hours of unpicking and a stiff neck, I’ve purchased some basting spray and sent my machine off for a service to see if the walking foot needs any adjusting. If you stare at the picture above long enough you can see my attempt at spiral quilting. I’m so annoyed I had to rip it out, it was looking great aside from the shifting. When I’m piecing a quilt it usually speaks to me about what sort of quilting would go well with it, but I’m getting nothing from this quilt…which is why it’s still in the naughty corner. I can’t decide how to quilt it!

Once I get the quilting sorted, I will use the edge of the backing as fold over binding, so the binding does this awesome colour matching like you can see above.

You can spy in these two pictures the fabric I used for the cornerstones. It’s from the C+S Moonlit range and has a hand drawn grid on it. I fussy cut all 99 squares so that they had the # centred in them…crazy girl! But they would have driven me crazy if they weren’t centred. I posted the picture below on Instagram and realised it would’ve looked pretty awesome pieced on point…ah well, next time!