I've saved this quilt to show you for
Blogger's Quilt Festival. "Climbing Curves" is a bright little quilt that I think would suit a baby boy or girl equally well. I used Saffron Craig's adorable
Beetle Bugs range, and the inspiration for the pattern came from her fabric, Snails and Ladders.
I started off with a bunch of sketches of straight ladders with lots of bugs climbing up the sides.
But then, after the curved piecing on the back of
this quilt turned out so well, I decided to stretch myself with some curved piecing of the ladders.
It was quite tricky (for me), and I had to unpick and try different techniques before I was happy. There was still a little bit of puckering, but nothing the iron couldn't take care of. Curved piecing isn't difficult on smaller cuts of fabric (like in my
Sea Views or
Sherbet Dreams patterns), but on large pieces its easy to get out of hand resulting in lots of puckering. That's why I decided that this wouldn't become a
pattern. I would hate for someone to buy my pattern, and then have difficulty following the technique and not be happy with the result. If I have time though, I might write a
tutorial sharing what I did, so you can give it a try if you like.
Originally, I planned to applique bugs climbing up the sides of the ladders, but when I auditioned the bugs it looked too busy to me. I liked the clean line of the curves by themselves. So I opted to hand quilt a few bugs and I really like the overall effect (you can find my hand quilting tutorial
here). I tried using a Hera Marker to mark the line of the bugs and it worked perfectly! It was easy to see the line and there was no mark to remove at the end.
I think a cute quilt deserves a cute model - Grace wears it well don't you think!
Thanks for visiting - be sure to check out all the other quilts at
Bloggers Quilt Festival.