I first saw The Cottage Garden Quilt book mentioned on the Fabbadashery facebook page. I think the chicken block clinched it as we used to keep chickens. I ordered it immediately and I wasn’t disappointed.
The Cottage Garden Quilt is designed and written by Kathryn Whittingham (She is also one of our UKQU members). It came about when she was teaching a regular patchwork class at Fabbadashery in Halifax. It is written with instructions for hand piecing but they are simple blocks which are easily machine pieced too. I hand embroidered, machine pieced and now I’m hand quilting it.
The instructions are clear and well written, I would say the quilt is achievable for a beginner as well as a more experienced quilter. The applique is created using bondaweb and then hand-embroidery. Kathryn uses basic embroidery stitches such as back-stitch, blanket stitch, french knots and lazy daisy and instructions are included on how to do these.
There are clear reverse templates for each pictorial block for the bondaweb, together with a true to size placement and stitch guide. She doesn’t include the extra embroidered detail such as the flowers and the grass, but there are clear photos of all the blocks to give plenty of ideas and inspiration. She encourages readers to make the quilt personal too. There are also photos of blocks made by members of her class which help with ideas on colour schemes and embroidery.
To give you an idea of size, the large square blocks such as the watering can have a finished size of 6″, where as the little blocks inside the stars are 3″. There are nine larger embroidered blocks and sixteen little ones. The detail on them is what makes them special, for example one of the cornerstones of the border is a cupcake, just 2″ square, not only does it have a cherry on the top, it also has swirls in the icing and hundreds and thousands sprinkled on!
This is my watering can block…
It is worth studying the photo at the front of the book of the whole quilt to see how the blocks balance each other. I realised when I was stitching the first row that the four blocks with light sashing help to calm what could be a busy quilt. I could also see how she used the same coloured sashing on opposite blocks, again helping to bring the quilt together. This is my quilt top just before I started hand quilting…
It is a gorgeous quilt, I don’t think I’ve made a quilt before that I have enjoyed making as much, from the embroidery, to the piecing and now hand-quilting it. The fact that I am hand-quilting this one says a lot as the last one I did was huge and took for ever, I vowed to myself never to hand-quilt again, but somehow I felt this quilt deserved to be hand quilted. It’s a nice size too, 56″ by 60″ isn’t too big to consider hand quilting, though it would be just as beautiful machine quilted.
The book is available from Kathryn’s website https://www.patchworkkatydesigns.co.uk/ and is £15.99. She’s just brought out a second book called the Seaside Quilt, so guess what I am making next!
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