A crochet quilt fusion experiment

Its always good to finish a project and stand back and admire the result if its all gone well. I’ve started 2016 on a bit of a high point as I’ve now finished the granny stripe snuggle blanket and the larger-than-life crochet quilt log cabin square that I’ve been making as part of the sunny colours crochet along with Lucy at Attic24.

Neither of the projects I’ve done are exactly the same as the ones in the CAL but I have used the same range of colours. My granny stripe blanket is smaller than one for a single bed. I’ve made it a bespoke size to snuggle under when I’m crocheting and relaxing in the evening. As my children are now both way taller than me, I’m the only one it fits 🙂

I love the log cabin square of the main crochet along but I didn’t want to commit the time to making an entire blanket. I started to make just one square and my first thought was to carry on making it a bit bigger and then make it into a fat bottomed bag like the ones we did in the Bagalong with Crafternoon Treats Facebook group in July.

The fat bottomed bags are made from a square of crochet fabric, which is then backed with a lining and gathered on each side to form a bag. I’ve now made two bags like this – the first lavender inspired bag made with Deramores Vintage Chunky…

And then the Attic24 Harmony squares bag that I made just in time for Yarndale in September…

As I crocheted away, adding cool stripes to one side and hot colours to the other, I loved the way the square was growing. But I realised that the style of the bag would show just one side of the square on each side of the bag and the lovely sunny centre would be hidden underneath. The two-tone hot and cold effect was also going to be completely lost.

Mmmmmmm – but the good thing about crochet is its very adaptable and flexible. A bag clearly wasn’t going to work – but the square was looking great as it grew, so I thought maybe I would carry on and make a lap blanket about a metre square.

But, as you can see from the photo at the start of this post, I changed my mind yet again and made it into a quilt-backed Ikea footstool cover!

My idea for a crochet quilt fusion – to update my Ikea footstool

We spent a quiet New Year so on New Year’s Day afternoon I decided to get crafty and make the quilted backing. As I have said before, I am not an expert at sewing and that is putting it mildly. I have got better in the last year because of the bag linings that I’ve made but this took me rather out of my comfort zone. I’m not going to show a lot of close ups of the backing because I made LOADS of mistakes. The good thing about it is that it does line the square very well and gives a good base so that the crochet log cabin square looks nice and flat. Its a crochet quilt pattern, backed by a quilt, which seems very apt.

Do how did I do this? Well the best answer is probably —— badly!!! So no tutorial for this as I would have a red face until 2017… but here is a sort of method to explain how I went about it.

Very briefly, I cut three squares of fabric about 5cm larger than the log cabin square (which measured 75cm by 75cm). One in a plain pink, one in a plain turquoise and one in a pink floral fabric. I then cut the plain turquoise square and the pink floral square in half on the diagonal and put them together so that I had two squares both half and half. I took one of these squares and sandwiched wadding between it and the plain ping square, sewing all around the edge and then from corner to corner and in a square shape around so that the wadding was held firmly in place. This was then sewn along three sides to the second half and half square, wrong side to wrong side, and then turned inside out. I sewed the fourth side by hand, carefully turning in the edges.

I then used the sewing machine to go all around the edge and along the line between the two triangles of fabric. I was then ready to hand stitch the quilted backing to the log cabin square.

I worked around the square, attaching the edge of the cotton fabric square to the edge of the second round of stitches in from the edge of the crochet log cabin square. To make things easier, I tacked each side in place first, rather than pinning as the layers made it all quite bulky and I didn’t want to use my quilting safety pins as I thought it might pull the crochet.

Once the backing was stitched in place, I crocheted around the square with one round of double crochet (UK terms) and then a round of crab stitch. To keep the optical illusion effect of the square, I used raspberry around the two hot coloured sides and denim around the two cool colours sides.

It fits perfectly and it brightens up my footstool and makes it a lot more comfortable to rest my feet on… All in all I’m very pleased with this crochet quilt fusion experience. I really need to work on my sewing though…

I suspect I’ll be getting a lot of use out of this in the next few months and this lovely arrangement of crochet decor can move around the room with me; in the window for weekend afternoons and on the sofa for the evenings.

Colours for my crochet quilt cover

I’ve posted a few pictures on facebook and it seems to have gone down quite well and a couple of people have asked for the colours. For the log cabin square I did add more colours than used in the Attic24 sunny pack – they were just Stylecraft colours that I had and wanted to use up. Remember that the pattern is here on Lucy’s blog at Attic24 – this is the link to the start of the CAL.

From the centre bottom, the colours working clockwise (round to the left, up and then to the right) are:

Spice, wisteria, aster, claret [first round]; burgundy, petrol, violet, shrimp [2nd round]; magenta, turquoise, meadow, bright pink [3rd round]; fondant, sage, pistachio, lipstick [4th round]; raspberry, denim, teal, copper [5th round]; shrimp, bluebell, mustard, fondant [6th round]; fiesta, teal, turquoise, raspberry [7th round]; lipstick, pistachio, turquoise, bright pink  [8th round]; plum,sage, cloud, spice [9th round]. The edging is raspberry (bottom and right side in the picture above) and denim (top and left side in the picture above).

The finished size is 75cm x 75cm.

Thanks for all the lovely comments on the finished crochet quilt cover on social media – the pic I posted on Facebook got the most likes of ANYTHING I’ve ever posted 🙂