Firstly, thank you so much to all the people who left me a comment on my post about whether to sash the quilt top or not!  You really helped me – I had lots of possibilities to weigh up and it was really useful for me to get words of wisdom from experienced quilters.  After considerable thought I went with my first instinct – no sashing.

As you can see, I made an additional four blocks, making it a square quilt.  I like the way that the white squares form their own pattern; sometimes I look at it and see the coloured blocks as individual units, and other times I focus on the white squares.  I still think that it would have looked good sashed in white, so the colours seemed to float – maybe for a future quilt!  I reckon that I did an okay job of matching up the points for a beginner.  I took it around to Megan’s today and got some suggestions for the border fabrics and widths.  I also discovered that since I don’t own a walking foot for my machine, I’ll be quilting this by hand.  Hmmmm.

Clare helped me to decide on the placement of the blocks, with lots of suggestions on which fabrics looked best with which based on their depth of colour, how busy the print was, etc.  She is only five – I was very impressed!  She thinks that I should have replaced the darkest green block with a new one in a different shade of green – she’s probably right, but I wanted to include this block because it’s my first patchwork block.  While I was sewing it all up, she did a little hand piecing herself.

She did a more even running stitch than I do!