Best Friends (Pooh and Piglet)

Last January I updated my hardcopy 'maker's journal' with my completed craft projects and was cross-referencing with photos and blog posts; I discovered a few projects from the past couple of years that hadn't been shared yet, so planned to get them here on record! It turned out to be a busy year, with shifting house in the middle of it and now I have about 90 minutes a day lost on travelling to work, but now that I've got all the photos taken, I can get back to the updates!

This is a printed panel cot quilt that I used as a practice project on my new Bernina Q20 longarm machine at the end of 2022 - and is there anyone who doesn't adore Pooh Bear and his friends from the Hundred Acre Wood?

I did some large stippling in the background, smaller stippling inside Pooh and Piglet, and some echo quilting on or around the motifs or other objects, matching colours on the illustrations. 

I love being able to stretch the quilt sandwich out on the longarm frame, without having to do all that basting with pins, and this was a good exercise in threading the machine, using stop/start stitches and bringing the thread to the top, along with (of course) practising the action of using the handles to move the needle to do the free-motion quilting - the Bernina Q20 moves so beautifully and the stitch regulator is fantastic!

Th quilt finished at 33.5" square and I used some Pooh Bear fabric from my stash for the backing.

Gizmo came to give cat-approval while I was taking photos; I had to do indoor shots as the weather wasn't great and I needed to gift this (to ex-neighbour Megan Macbeth's new baby son, Patrick Wyatt).

I used some leftovers of the backing fabric to fussy cut the images and made a bassinet quilt as well with some square in square blocks (approx 20" x 24" finished) for the Southland Neonatal Unit - no photos though, as I forgot to get photos of it before donating the pile of quilts to the unit the week before Christmas!