Patchwork: Bear in the Woods Quilt

So, the only quilt that I have made this year is finished. As mentioned previously, this is the first time that I have sewn any foundation paper piecing. It was pretty tricky, and my bear is by no means perfect, but I love him more for not being so. The pattern for the bear was purchased from Etsy. The pattern came in two sizes and although I did contemplate making both and having a baby bear too, the larger was fiddly enough and I was not ready for anything smaller...maybe next year?

I'm really pleased with the way that my forest has come out. I only bought two pieces of fabric for the trees - both the Moda Ombre Confetti fabric in the avocado and mint colour ways. The gold confetti dots really sparkle in the changing light and make it really special.

My original plan was to have just the two larger size of trees, but it became clear that there was just too much white space, so in came the smaller trees. I'll be honest, I completely winged it with the creation of the trees. I drew and cut out my triangles for the trees, then  cut out larger rectangles in white, eyeballing where to cut. 

An old cream throw over the train set became my impromptu quilt wall, and for this type of project, I really needed to see how things would look and it took a little while to get the placement just so. As I wanted to retain the irregular, random look of the forest, it took quite a bit of figuring out how to sew the trees together in rectangles so that I would not end up with any awkward Y seams.

Once, I had created two large panels, I played with the two potential layouts (above) and went with the latter. 

The quilt is backed with some forest green fabric and my quilting was pretty basic, as usual - this time I traced round the largest trees. 

Luckily, I had enough of the avocado fabric to use that as the binding, and had a serendipitous moment when there is no visible join to the ombre effect! 

Such a nice sized quilt to pop over your legs whilst watching a festive film!

Love Mrs Jones x

P.S. Apologies for the quality of the photos, the light is really bad at the moment.