Last week, whilst shopping for Aunt Lucy’s skirt fabric in Country Threads, Bath, I spotted a jelly roll of this gorgeous “Rouenneries” fabric and couldn’t resist bringing it home, especially since I’d seen one or two string quilts appearing here and there recently.

 

 

Using a ready-made selection fabric is a breeze and I’d soon whipped out twenty blocks (twenty one actually…don’t know how that happened!)

 

 

Joined them altogether in no time, too.

 

 

I felt rather pleased with the result.

 

 

For the first time I can remember, too, I bought backing and border fabric at the same time, and since I had wadding at home already, there was no reason why I couldn’t simply go right on and finish it.

 

 

I decided to use my “signature” quilting method (!) tying the layers together with a shell button and red perle thread from my stash.  I decided to quilt circles in perle thread too, using a fairly long stitch which would be a feature of the design.  I traced a few randomly sized circles and began to stitch in red.

Whether it was the sunshine, I don’t know, but my mind wandered and I recalled Georgina’s story of Binky’s Quilt. 

Hmm.  I’m using red thread.

Where did it come from?  Was it one I dyed myself?

I thought that I’d better check before doing much more stitching.  So far, I had sewn on 30 buttons and stitched three circles using it.  Not too late to stop.  I grabbed a little of it and ran it under the kitchen tap, placing the wet thread on some white kitchen towel.

 

 

Georgina, thank you for sharing your experience so that I could learn from it! 

I whipped out all that red stitching, replacing it with the taupe colour in only just over an hour.  I’ll get some “real”  red perle thread, colour fast and trustworthy next week but in the meantime, I’ll heave a sigh of relief and thank goodness that I thought to check before it was too late.

I really didn’t want a pink quilt.