Covent Garden

Covent Garden is in the current issue of Australian Patchwork & Quilting magazine (Vol 22 No 11).

It's an easy flannel quilt - flannel quilts need to be relatively straightforward because the flannel doesn't lend itself well to small pieces.

It's actually pieced in blocks (18 straight, 7 curved) in a 5x5 layout, but I started by laying out all the coloured pieces together to get a  good balance.

The photos above and below show the effect lighting has. They were both taken outside in natural, indirect light, but the top one used a fill-in flash to minimise the shadowing and move the focus from the quilting to the piecing/fabrics. The bottom one allows the shadowing created by the angled sunlight to emphasise the texture of the quilting.

The quilting is a free-hand allover pattern based on the open feathers I often use. The flower pattern is created by quilting 2 feathers, then swirling up into a question mark, and quilting some half-circles around the 'head' of the question mark. It creates a lovely effect, but does take some thinking about which way to quilt each question mark (facing forwards or back-to-front) to end up in the right place to go where you need to fill next. A few times I slipped up, but it's easy to fill the odd spaces with an extra flower head or another feather 'leaf' or two.

My working name for the quilt was Garden Paths, but the quilting pattern made me think of flower markets and dropped flowers. While I was sewing the binding on one evening, I introduced James and Eleanor to one of my favourite movies - My Fair Lady; in which Eliza Doolittle collects and sells flowers at Covent Garden.

Most of the fabrics are Valori Wells prints, but there are a couple (the larger dots) by Amy Butler, two generic tone-on-tones and a random hot pink poodle print - plus the border stripe.

For consistency, I bound the quilt in flannel, but a full, double-fold binding is really too thick in flannel (I've tried it and it works, but it's bulkier than I'd like, and they seem more prone to coming loose) so I cut it about 3/4in narrower than usual and pressed in 3/8 - 1/2in along one edge (for hand-sewing to the back) before machining the other edge to the front of the quilt.