So rather than today's I Made This, I have some news, and a repost!

The news is that I was lucky enough to chat with Ashley Yousling of Woolful for her podcast recently and it went up yesterday! You can listen to it here. I'm featured alongside the lovely Karen from Fringe Association, whose blog I featured way back in the very early days of this blog. Fringe is one of my favourite blogs, always informative and inspiring. And Ashley's podcast is wonderful. If you haven't heard it yet you can get them all from iTunes or from her blog. I feel really lucky to be included in such fine company!

The repost today is of a post that was originally called Perfection in Imperfection, and I wanted to highlight it because I thought it went along well with the podcast. I Made This will be back next week but in a way this repost is really an old version of I Made This from me (I kicked off the series with this post). There are so many more of you reading now than there were a year and a half ago, so many of you may not have seen it.

This quilt is one of the things that I am most proud of, and not because it is perfect. Rather it is because of all I learned and also because I love it. Everytime I see it it makes me happy and reminds me that I am able to create stuff I love with really simple techniques.

So I finished a single bed quilt - it's the sample for the Anatomy of a Quilt class we were running - and after that will live out it's life on my spare bed. It's not perfect. Nor is it what I hoped or thought it would be when I started. But I really really love it!

Which has lead to a very photo heavy post!! Apologies.

I had this idea when I started it. I had some gorgeous linen from Tessuti* - over two metres of it in fact. It is such a simple beautiful pattern that I didn't want to cut it up - I reckon it would have gone against the laws of nature.

*If you are ever looking for gorgeous linen then check out Tessuti - just stunning!!

So a whole cloth quilt was the only way forward. I wanted super simple but without too much quilting as I still wanted the linen to be able to move and wrinkle. Nothing better than wrinkled linen. The spare room it was made for is a simple space so i wanted something that would fit.

I had been practicing my hand quilting by making a few baby quilts for my smallest girl child and I really wanted to try something bigger. That said I didn't have time (and maybe not the courage yet?) to handquilt the whole thing. So what to do. I haven't come across many quilts that use handquilting and machine quilting in the one quilt but I thought I would give it a try. My idea was some feature quilting in the middle and then machine quilting in off-white around it, so you would see the impression of the quilting lines but they would be played down. I used organic cotton batting which meant I could leave the quilting lines to about 5/6inches apart. Having the quilting lines so far apart meant I got to keep my favourite linen characteristic - wrinkles!!

There are so many issues with this quilt - which is going to make it a great teaching piece - sooo many issues....

But I really want to focus on how much I love it. The fact that it doesn't need to be perfect to be perfect. That it can be beautiful without being perfect. The fact that I learnt so many many things while making it. Things that I actually already knew in theory but I now have tangible proof of. Gotta love some in-your-face mistakes to help you really learn.

It was also a good reminder that even though your initial idea might not work - this looks nothing like what I planned - it can turn out even better.

Have you had mistakes that turn out better than the original idea??

Felicia