Adventures in quilting

I've been bitten by the quilting bug. Hard. When Dave suggested I buy a sewing machine a few months ago, I never thought I'd find myself making quilts. Turning up a few hems maybe, darning holes in Lucas's school trousers...but a quilt? No way!

I finished my first quilt last week, which I will eventually post about once it's been gifted, and almost immediately I found myself back at the fabric shop for supplies for my second. And then I popped into Hobbycraft for a lint brush to clean out my sewing machine--I had no idea that they needed to be cleaned!--and came out with this pretty 'jelly roll' of fabric... I clearly can't be trusted near fabric at the moment.

The world of fabric is a bit bewildering at first. There are a slew of new terms and a dizzying array of fabric types. I always thought cotton was just, well, cotton, but no. There's cotton drill, lawn, poplins and probably more!! There are also pre-cut fabric packs available, like the jelly roll which is made up of 40 x 2.5" coordinating strips and perfect for turning into a quilt.

I found an easy sounding pattern online and cut the entire thing into 6.5" strips and then tried to randomly put them together into blocks of three strips.

This should have resulted in 6.5" square blocks when sewn together and pressed, but either my seams were too wide or the fabric shrank a bit with the steam when I pressed as I now have rectangles. 

My grand adventure is temporarily stalled while I slice the finished blocks down to 5.5" square. This is every bit as tedious as you can imagine!! 

(I'm actually waiting for my car to be fixed at the garage rather than walking home and trimming the blocks!)

So that's what I've been up to of late. Hopefully I'll have a very pretty quilt top to show you in a few days!