Finished quilt - Smitten Stash Buster

A special welcome to those new visitors coming here from Lily's Quilts where I am linking up in the Small Blog Meet. For more quilt related posts, please click the "quilt" category to the left or at the end of this post.

I started this quilt back in August 2011 when I attempted patch work properly for the first time. Before, I had only been making simple quilts with squares or rectangles sewn together rather randomly.

Originally inspired by one of the ladies at the Crafty Sewing Mamas at the American Baby Centre forums, I decided to try to recreate a pattern called "Smitten".

These are some of the Smitten quilts I found on the internet:

As it was a bit of a trial and (expected) error, I decided to use scraps I had laying around, including material from ball dresses, men's shirts and children's bedding.

Here are a few of the early blocks, some of which were a complete disaster….

Here is a close-up of the block actually used in the centre of the quilt; before it was ironed.

In June this year, i.e. almost two years after I started, I had finally selected nine blocks (the least bad ones!) and added sashing and the border.

As I was having quite a few quilt tops pieced, but no finished quilts, I decide to send off six of them (yes, SIX) to be professionally quilted by two experienced long arm quilters.

Add binding, backing and a pantograph quilting, this is what the finished quilt looks like:

And with some of the backing showing:

Finally, nicely rolled up showing all the goodness of the blues, whites and reds.

Sashing and binding fabrics were bought from Fabrics Galore, http://www.fabricsgalore.co.uk (this is a rather temperamental home page) or try https://www.facebook.com/fabricsgalorelondon

This quilt was long arm quilted by Debbie at www.longarm-quilting.co.uk.