You might remember the Wake Me Up quiltalong that Emma Jansen ran during Melbourne’s first lockdown.  She ran another for her Whirligig quilt pattern during Melbourne’s second lockdown.  I chose to make the largest size, working with fabrics that were already in my quilting stash. Most of my quilting fabrics were bought when I first discovered sewing and quilting blogs. They date between 2007 to around 2012. Many of these fabrics were bought with the eye of a garment sewer more than the eye of a quilter, and that creates it’s own challenges when trying to make effective quilt tops. This pattern uses a decent amount of solid as a background, so I figured that I could make it work without having the issue of not enough value and contrast difference that I had with the quilt top I made in the first quiltalong.

I ran into a problem when making this quilt top – because I ran out of the white solid fabric that I was using for the background. I had a couple of other white fabrics in stash, but they weren’t the same white. There are so many variations in shade! Luckily, Cutting Cloth is in my 5km lockdown travel radius, so I was able to do a contactless drop off of the leftover solid fabric for them to match. Another metre was all that I needed to be able to complete the quilt top. While I was waiting for the additional solid, Emma had fun playing with the photos of the blocks that I’d shared on social media to see how they might look in a finished quilt.

This photoshopped quilt really inspired me to keep going and get this quilt top finished – I knew that it would be so pretty! And here is the actual finished result.

Each block is slightly different, and I have oriented each one to keep the windmills turning. As you can tell, it’s a decent size! I have now pieced together backing, using as much of the leftover fabric from the quilt front as possible plus some of the non-matching white solid that was in my stash and some more fabrics that coordinated. I’ve also cut the binding. It’s getting closer to it being a finished quilt!  I plan to quilt this myself on my domestic machine, and have been watching some Craftsy classes to refresh my memory on how to quilt.  I’ve took a couple of classes on it years ago, but I am definitely in need of practice.