V & A checkerboard quilt

Remember this? I finished the top over Christmas.

The edge is all on the bias, so I machined around the quilt to stabilise it. Rather than a binding, I will face the edge I think, so it will have a similar appearance to the turned in edge on the original. Facing it will keep the edge for going wavy, so it looks better when hung up - not an issue the maker of the original quilt would have needed to consider.

The original is quilted in concentric squares. I wanted to quilt mine in diagonal zigzag waves, but have decided to do something closer to the original design after all, quilting in the ditch, plus vertically and horizontally through the centres of the squares, then (maybe) a single square in each square created. Wadding/batting will probably be 80/20 cotton poly.

I will keep the wave quilting for this - a jelly roll version of the Dryslwyn quilt from Jen Jones' collection. It was quilted in waves and I can imagine the zigzags working well going around the centre. There is a photo of the original on page 37 of Janet Rae's "Quilts of the British Isles". It probably has a white on blue mini print in real life but in the photo it has always looked like polka dots (to me!), so I wanted to use polka dots for mine. The jelly roll is Moda's "Collection for a Cause - Charity", with the plain yellow and cream strips removed and replaced with pieces from another Moda range, cut from a charm pack (the light blues). The original quilt looks like it was made from fabric samples, as many of the prints are repeated in different colourways - often only slightly different - so it is a good subject for a jelly roll, which always have pattern repeats in more than one colourway. Once again, there are various symmetries going on with the patch arrangement. "Charity" includes floral stripes, similar to those in the original quilt but overall there are more colour similarities than print pattern. Because the jelly roll pieces are smaller than those in the original, my quilt will have more patchwork rounds - it is only about half way there.