Liberty star quilt (soundtrack not suitable for work)

Oooh! Hello! Who are you? Who am I? (I'm kidding. I know these things. You are very nice people (as evidenced in the last commentbox) and I am a woman who has left all the recycling all over the floor in order to come here because I am an URBAN REBEL.

I sewed a quilt. By hand. Oh yes. And it has stars on it. Take that, society, and all your petty expectations.

(We're singing Rage Against the Machine now, if you hadn't already started before me.)

I slept under this quilt for weeks before getting round to blogging it. Because rebels, we don't do deadlines. We don't do admin. We're not cosy. (Unless we're under quilts.)

It took me over a year to make. I shed blood, man. I carried the tools of my anarchy everywhere. Pins. Tiny scissors. Bits of cut-out paper. It was toil: sheer English paper piecing toil.

Tracy told me I could handquilt it. I bought a really expensive thimble. I am supremely grateful for her belief in me, but it turns out it was unfounded. I can't handquilt - at least not happily - so I quilted it on the machine. I make no apologies for this.

(Soundtrack changes to I Am What I Am, by Gloria Gaynor.)

I am so incredibly happy with this quilt. It's made of Liberty scraps, which I bought over months in scrumptious little rolls. The white is provided by an old sheet which had seen better days. It took ages; matching the colours, unpicking when I thought they didn't work. It became an obsession: to the point where Eldest would sit down on family film night, grab hold of my wrist and say, firmly, "No English Paper Piecing".

It could stand to be wider, by one star? maybe two? But I only had enough of one of the fabrics to make ten stars; so ten stars it was.  It would have been shorter, had I not come into some gorgeous new scraps which demanded to be included. I had to physically stop myself adding extras, turning it into a constantly lengthening quilty strip. It's backed with two or three Liberty misprints, and I love them. They were 50p each; they're bonkers, they're soft, they're unseen.

Special thanks go to Tess, who more or less designed it; and who showed me how to do the wibbly-wobbly machine quilting thing.

(For an excellent tutorial on English Paper Piecing, look no further than Flossie Teacakes, whose blog got me started with the whole thing.)

Tune in next time for the tale of the Quick Square Tablecloth, made on a day when I really should have been going to the supermarket.