Playmat quilt for Alice

We have been on a couple of visits to family and I decided that I needed to make a mat for Alice to play on. We have a lovely baby gym thing that Alice absolutely loves, but that is not really portable. She loves her kicking time on that and has just started to roll over (look out world!). This means that she needs some time to kick about and let off some steam. I figured that if I could make a little mat then I can easily roll it up and take it with me to different places for her to have somewhere clean and slightly (really slightly) padded to play on.

We took this down to Cornwall for Alice to meet her great-grandad. It took me two afternoons to complete in total. The squares are from free charm packs that I have been keeping for years. I get them when I spend over a certain amount of money on my favourite fabric website. Fortunately the colours worked really well. I didn't particularly plan the layout of the quilt. I sorted the patches into colour groups, eg a yellow pile, blue pile, red pile etc. and then paired the colours, using the occasional white based square to break up big chunks of solid colours. I then just laid them out on the floor and played around with the layout for a few minutes, not thinking about it too much and going with instinct. I quilted it using free motion large swirls. Roughly one per square. The backing is a solid piece of fabric (1.5 metres was bought and I have a little strip left) that I cut so that there was an overhang of fabric that I then folded over the patchwork to create the binding.

I'm actually really pleased with how this turned out. I was ready to cut into my stash of fabric but the colours that I had actually worked. Charm packs are a real time saver! It made me realise how much time I spend just cutting fabric in comparison to sewing the quilts.

Designing the quilt

Whilst I have mapped out the quilt and therefore know how many diamonds I need, I haven't planned the exact placement of each fabric. I have created a washing line that stretches across our bookshelf and have been using this as a makeshift design wall. I realised that I would need to do some kind of planning because I want to limit the amount of orange that is in the quilt. The idea is that the orange diamonds add little pops of colour so I need to be careful that the diamonds are a) distributed well and b) not all facing the same direction. Hopefully by creating a bit of a design wall I can make sure that the eye will be drawn around the quilt rather than just to one particular area. 

In terms of an update: 9 jigsaw pieces are sewn together with extra pieces added to the surrounding areas to create the edge. One more jigsaw piece is sewn together but won't be added yet. I think I need to make several jigsaw pieces and play around with their placements before I attach them to the main part of the quilt.