Project 'Timely'

I have been working steadily away at my own sample quilt for many, many months. 
I started it about a year ago, and feel I am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and have been working on it during my spare time, when I'm not too tired. 

I've really been trying to focus completely on this project, so no playing around with other things even though I am really keen to sew some more garments, (and have bought the patterns and fabrics!!) - it's so huge and is easy to loose sight of the end, but I really do feel like the end is close. 

The idea behind it was to incorporate all my favourite colours into one big cover. (It's actually going to be a quilted cover for a massive wool doona, as opposed to a single quilt) 

I had some inspiration from a favourite anime and it's gone from there. As this is my first ever quilted project I was originally just going to do it as a block quilt just throwing random blocks together. I did three panel's like this before I ran out of fabric! A trip to the fabric store and I had more colours in the same scheme - but I had also found the hexagon paper pieces... soo a few hours of cutting fabric I had started to stitch them together, I laid it out and didn't like it. It was to untidy for my liking. I pulled them all apart and decided to do squares. This was a major setback! I used up all the fabric I had bought, realised I needed more so another trip to the fabric store and found some fabulous new fabric and small hexagons as well!! Fantastic! I am using the little hexagons to use up all the scrap fabrics, and will probably create a border with them... I haven't decided yet! 

I know it sounds like I had no plan with this project, and in truth I had a vague idea of what I wanted to do but nothing concrete. I really wanted it to be my own creation, and didn't want to follow any plans. It sounds terrible with the many trips to the fabric store, but it's actually something I am really enjoying! I am creating this monster from a spark of an idea; and getting the supplies as I need them has helped me to be even more creative with the project. If I had just bought all the fabric in one hit, I would never have branched out into the hexagons and it is supposed to be a sample quilt so trying a number of things. I am even going to put a few embroidered panels in for good measure!! 
On that note, here are some teaser photos of the panels and everything to give you an idea.

 All the panels I have done so far, there are 3 of the long strips in the middle. You can see the colours I am using in this are purple, blue, green and pink. I am terrible at putting colours together but I think this is working :-)

 The strips up close... so pretty!

 hexagons before they go onto the squares...

 After I hand sew them onto the purple squares... I am cheating cost wise here, an old purple sheet I bought many years ago in the wrong size for our bed has become the handy backing fabric here.

And finally, a practice run at transferring an image onto fabric.... How did I do it?? I first tried printing onto specific transfer paper I bought a few years ago and never got around to trying out... It didn't work :-( I don't know if I did something wrong, honestly I was a bit dubious about this working anyway. So then I remembered I had seen a cheat to use kitchen baking paper. I didn't look it up, I just went for it - and it worked!!! I will post more about my process once I embroider my panel.


Thats all for today peeps!

See me next time!