Oriental Quilting

Happy Monday dear followers and visitors, got any exciting plans for this new week ?  I hope to fit in some crafting but apart from that it's pretty much unplanned the rest of the time.

Today I thought I'd share a sewing project with you.  The idea for my Oriental style quilt came about when I had a piece of left over black fleece after completing the quilt for my Grandson which I shared with you recently.  The fleece was large enough to make a lap size quilt and, whilst rummaging about in my fabric stash (looking for something completely different I might add) I came across a pack of ready cut 4 inch square pieces of fabric in a lovely black and white Willow Pattern design - Perfect !

You may well be thinking that the squares look larger than 4 x 4 inches and you are absolutely right.  I took one whole piece for the centre, cut two more pieces in half to create 4 rectangles and another square cut into quarters creating four small squares.  Then..... I stitched them all together again, mixing the different designs on the fabric to create the larger squares.

I added the red sashing (strips) vertically between rows of squares to create the design and I think the red makes the design really pop.

Here's a close up shot of the squares so you can see more clearly the smaller pieces sewn together.

I attached the fleece to the back (no need to add extra wadding or batting).  Finally I added the finishing quilting stitching using a lovely curved line pattern - which is a stitch built into my Janome Horizon 8900 sewing machine - following the seams and using black thread.  If you look closely at the close up shot you can just see the curved quilting stitch.  The quilting stitch also made a nice design on the fleece back. 

The last step was to use more strips of the red fabric to add a binding around the edges.

I hope you've enjoyed seeing today's project, thanks for dropping by.