This is the first of several posts about my first proper quilt project. I started this project ages ago and kept coming back to it. I was inspired by an old patchwork blanket my mother had made when she was young and I also wanted to do something nice with a large collection of scrap fabric pieces.

When I started with this project I knew nothing about quilting and so everything was pretty inefficient. I cut out two cardboard shapes, a large and a small square (1/4 of the large square) and started cutting out small and large squares form the scrap fabric. Some of the large fabric squares I cut in half to form rectangles.

Since the fabrics varied greatly in stiffness and thickness, I backed some of the more fragile fabrics with simple cotton fabric. I fused the two layers with a little bit of free-hand quilting — introducing organic shapes like leaves and wavy patterns that I felt resonated well with the fabric choices and color palette. In my mind I’ve termed this project the “organic quilt”.

Then I tiled the squares and rectangles to a somewhat irregular mosaic. It took some thinking, to figure out what was the best way to sew pieces together to avoid having to attach pieces into corners. I grew the mosaic to a longish rectangular panel. Then, over a very long time period, I kept adding and eventually had finished 4 mosaic panels.

I decided that this was enough for a quilt and that it was time to finally finish the project. Little did I know, that the majority of work was still ahead, but more on that in future posts.