A bathmat for my mother

To look at the last three posts one might think that I'd given up on doing anything other than quilting things in the run up to Christmas. It did seem like that at the time. There are non-quilted things to come, I promise. Some of you might remember some hexagons that I was working with before Christmas...you might also remember a Kona cotton jelly roll. Both of these things ended up being turned into a bathmat for my mother.

For such a small thing, this bathmat has an unbelievably large amount of work in it. It is quilted very densely in lots of different directions in the hope that it would create a more slip-proof grippiness to the towelling backing. I love the way that the quilting looks on the towelling - an unintentional bonus.

The colours were all chosen to (hopefully) go well with my mother's bathroom's pale aqua glass tiles (why did I have one of her bathroom tiles in my house? Because I asked for one to use as a coaster last summer because they're so lovely).

Here it is in its new home.

I loved piecing this mat together - from the hexagons, to the solid border, to the rows of rectangles, it all felt like the kind of intricate piecing that I never normally have the patience for.

While I did enjoy the actual quilting, it was also far more time consuming and painstaking than I'd anticipated. To avoid snagging the towelling backing, every single time I turned a corner, or began sewing a new line of diagonal stitching I had to lower the feed dog teeth and then raise them back up again once I'd repositioned the mat...which left me feeling slightly on edge as this was done hundreds of times (no, that really isn't an exaggeration). I had thought of placing a layer of stitch and tear beneath, but the denser the sewing the more it tends to leave behind tiny white flecks caught beneath the stitches ...which may have been more irritating.

I think I'd quite like one of these for our new bathroom once it's finished...but first I'd need to decide what colour we will paint the walls. Inspiration for making a bathmat came from Katy and her beautiful and wonderfully photographed mat...it really hadn't occurred to me that you could actually make your own bathmat until I saw hers.

I also made this little drawstring bag to hang on the back of her bathroom door.

There's something pleasing about using metal hardware. It makes me feel as though I haven't made it myself.

It's odd to be blogging constantly about things made in December, which seems a long time ago and isn't at all where my head is now. The detachment of not being still wrapped up in the excitement of a project as I blog about it makes me feel as though I'm doing a child's Show & Tell to you. And just in case you're wondering where my head currently is, then I'd say that half of it has possibly gone missing without trace, and the other half is immersed in dress patterns and having quite the most amount of fun imaginable. This week I have woken every morning with a chest full of butterflies at the excitement of another day of drawing, tracing, cutting and sewing - it's a lovely feeling to be almost on the crest of making what you hope is going to be a really wonderful dress, even if never turns out quite to be that thing when you try it on (so many abandoned muslins this week). In fact I sent a text message to Mr Teacakes one day this week suggesting that it should be illegal to have so much fun with a chalk pen, some pins and a few metres of jersey fabric. Well, imagine truly believing that the fun couldn't get any better, and then reading that you have authorisation to go downstairs and eat one of your husband's own birthday chocolates...

Excitedly,
Florence x