This is the playmat / quilt which I made for my new little niece, Olive. I'm not a quilter and they usually turn out full of 'rustic charm' (i.e. slightly wonky and rather uneven) but I'm really pleased with this one. I LOVE the colours, which I chose because I thought they would go well with my sister's house and because we didn't know if she was having a boy or a girl so it needed to be pretty gender neutral.

I chose a very simple design for obvious reasons! The finished quilt measured 140cm x 110cm wide (so that i could use a single piece of backing fabric). I pretty much just cut strips of my fabrics in 3 different widths - I think they were 8, 10 and 12cm (approx 3, 4 and 5"). I sorted the strips by width and sewed all of the same ones together, then cut the strips up into pieces which ranged from about 70 - 90cm (2-3 feet).

I played around with the arrangement of my strips until I was happy with them (all the while trying to fend off the cat who seemed hell bent on sitting on my fabric as usual! Does anyone else have this problem? - it happens EVERY TIME!). I then cut some strips of white fabric in the same widths, sewing them to the ends of my patterned fabric to make each one the right width (or wider). I did this very imprecisely and then trimmed them afterwards.

I bought the bias binding (because, quite frankly, I HATE making bias binding - it's like the bane of my life! OK, well that might be a little bit of an overstatement, but I do find it very annoying. It's worth it sometimes of course, but still… if you can buy a lovely one like this then why bother?!)

It's hand quilted, because any time I try to quilt on my sewing machine it just ends up all puckered. Also, I wanted to be able to sit in front of the TV with my feet up, re-watching episodes of The West Wing while I did it (I may be a little obsessed with that show…)

I can't remember the name of the backing fabric, but I do love it so! Can anyone enlighten me?