Bordered Diamonds - WiP

Last week I put my sewing machine away and cleared the table tennis table I use for sewing. The reason? I really had to get out my Bordered Diamonds quilt and finish it.

Bordered Diamonds quilt

I've been working on this quilt for quite some time. I first saw the Timeless Treasures Plume range in my local quilt shop back in January 2012. I just loved the colours in the Peacock fabric, and knew I'd like to make a quilt with it. I spent 24 hours going through my saved images, thinking of a pattern I could use that where I could keep large sections of the fabric in tact. I'd always admired the Kaffe Fassett Bordered Diamonds pattern, so decided to use that.

I went back to the shop and bought some of the Peacock fabric plus a couple of other fabrics in the range. I then spent most of 2012 collecting complementary fabrics. I picked up more of the Plume range from other shops, plus some from the Shimmer range, and other fabrics that I knew would tie in well.

It wasn't until January 2013 that I started to cut into the fabrics. By then I had far more than I needed, but that's a whole other quilt. (I made another quilt from the scraps which I'll show once this one is finished).

I pieced the top during the early part of 2013. I then started to think about the backing fabric and I knew I wanted a new design by Chong-a Hwang from the Tree of Life range by Timeless Treasures.

By mid 2013 I had a quilt sandwich, but it was the biggest quilt I've ever made, and was going to take time to hand quilt. I quilted in the ditch around each of the 108 diamonds with quilting thread, but I knew it needed something more, so I started to hand quilt with Perle 8 inside each of the diamonds. I got about half way through this, and then put it aside for some reason.

Hand quilting inside the diamonds

Once I had quilted all the diamonds on the edges, Mum helped my out by putting the binding on during one of her visits.

Now it's winter again and I really have to finish it. There are less than 40 diamonds left to do, and I can do at least 4 each day, so that's only 10 days of quilting. The only problem now is that the stitches I'm doing now are different to those I did a year ago. I think I'm going to finish the whole quilt first, and then give myself permission to unpick the 10 blocks I'm most unhappy with. Otherwise this quilt will never be finished!

I'm linking up with Alyce at Sew Cute Tuesday, Esther at Esther's WOWs, Lee at Freshly Pieced, Kelly at My Quilt Infatuation and Amanda Jean at Crazy Mom Quilts.