The Patchwork Background

In the design stage of my holiday quilt I carefully measured the squares which would contain the pictures so they would fit nicely into a patchwork background.  Unfortunately, after the first couple of pictures had been created, I completely forgot about these sizes and so a bit of re-designing was required. 

I started by drawing up squares on paper to tack the pictures in place so they could be worked into a patchwork background.

Tacking the pictures onto their paper squares which were drawn out with the very useful patchwork template Sar gave me during our session at Chesterfield

I then started to make the small blue squares which would represent the narrow canals.

Those blue squares do look very small!

With the help of graph paper I drew up the design around each picture and now I had strayed from my original design I was able to create different spaces around the square which I thought were more interesting.  I marked out the patchwork pieces ready to be cut into templates.

The design on graph paper with each piece numbered and this photo was a useful reference once the template had been cut up.

The process seemed easy in theory and I gaily cut out the templates, tacked my fabric to them and started sewing them in place.  But it soon became apparent I had missed an important point, the squares didn’t fit accurately together due to the thickness of the fabric which I hadn’t taken into account.

The bottom of the dark green square should have fitted flush with the bottom of the cygnet square

It took a bit of fiddling to reduce some of the templates so all the pieces fitted snugly together.

The cygnet surrounded by green countryside

The next pictures were given a surrounding in a similar way but I used a bit of guesswork to trim down the templates so they fitted together.  The lines of small blue squares represent the narrow canals and the wider blue squares are for broad canals. 

Progress so far and the quilt is coming together

As always I'm thinking ahead to the next stage and hopefully it won't be long before I can start adding the finer details to the quilt.