Hello everyone, Laura here!

Last summer we had loads of fun dyeing metres and metres of fabric in an indigo bucket. We kept it going for weeks, dipping in white fabrics and also over-dyeing already coloured fabrics. I just love indigo blue don’t you? So easy to use, it goes beautifully with so many other colours.

Heaped on my workroom table, my blue fabrics looked lovely next to some undyed white cotton, that classic combo of blue and white made me think of china so what better patchwork block to stitch than Broken Dishes.

I used a fast piecing method to make a pile of half square triangles. If you’ve not done any fast piecing methods before do take a look at our workshops to find out more.

With those done, the Broken Dishes blocks are easy to put together. I sew them into strips, then join the strips together.

The only challenging bit is trying to get all those points to come together neatly. Eight points! That can be quite tricky. Just try to have your seams nesting together on the back and get them as close as you can. Some of mine are no where near perfect, but over all, the effect still looks great. And when they are perfect, well that’s just a bonus!

With the piecing all done, next is the quilting. Quilting something with so many seams can be quite difficult, it’s certainly something that I’d usually choose to do by machine rather than hand. My sewing machine can thunder through the bulk of those seam allowances really satisfyingly. Where possible, I like to do minimal marking so I’ve used the piecing as my guide and simply stitched shallow curves from point to point.

I thought a single line looked a bit mean so I’ve double up on the short seams which fills the space quite nicely. I chose a slate blue thread for this which blends nicely on the blue triangles, but obviously stands out on the white ones. I like how this breaks up the white shapes and integrates them into the blue, but if you wanted your quilting to be more about texture than line, you’d switch to a white thread on those white triangles.

I’ve pieced enough triangles for a quilt, but I need some large throw cushions so that’s what I’m working towards. This is one side of the cushion done, now off to complete the other.

Back soon!

Love Laura
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