Bloggers' Quilt Festival Spring 2012

Suddenly blogland is awash with entries to the Bloggers' Quilts Festival:

As my followers will know, I'm pretty knew to both blogging and quilting, so I have no illusions about winning anything, but I am really excited to take part and welcome new people to my blog! So if that's you, welcome, I'm so pleased to see you, and I hope you will take a look around my blog and will like what you see!

Anyway, on to my entry! I really wanted to enter this quilt, which I designed myself and made for my best friend's little girl. It was the second quilt I made:

...but I only have this one (pretty rubbish) photo, and I can't take any new photos of it as its owner would not be parted from it!

So I've decided to enter my New York Beauty quilt. My followers will have seen it before, but I had so many positive comments about it *blush* that I hope they won't mind seeing it again!

I decided to take part in the New York Beauty Quiltalong because I'd never done paper piecing, I'd never done curves and I'd never done a quiltalong! (brave or crazy, you decide!)! So I made a start and this was my first block:

 It went together so easily, I decided to make 4:

So then it seemed sensible to carry on like this, making 4 blocks each week. Week 2:



 Then I started to lose steam! I think in retrospect it was too ambitious to plan to do 4 a week alongside a full-time job and my other sewing! So I kept putting off doing week 3, but eventually came up with this:

 ...and then this is week 4:

...and then I stopped. For a good few weeks. I just couldn't face the thought that there were still 6 blocks to go, 4 of each one... that's 24 squares...AHHHH!! So my beautiful blocks sat there assuming they would be relegated to UFO-dom forever. Then I saw Teresa's beautiful entry for the weekly Quilting bloggers competition and thought what a great way that would be to finish off my quilt! So I got to work, week 5's block is bottom right:

 And then when it was all quilted and bound, I took it to my mum's to take some pictures:

 For only my 5th ever quilt, I'm pretty damn proud of it!