In my sewing career I have made hundreds of quilts and one fancy dress costume. Once or twice I have hemmed or mended a few clothing items on the sewing machine but that is absolutely it, until this week.

Rewind a little bit to last month’s Portland Modern Quilting Guild meeting where a new swap was proposed. I had never participated in a swap before, they scare me a little – you have to do something on deadline to please someone else. Too much pressure for me. Last month though, thru a combination of pain medication and peer pressure I said yes to making a quilted container.

Fast forward to this week. I need the container for Thursday’s meeting and I had not even started. I had spent weeks procrastinating and convincing myself I could not do this. With time running out I bite the proverbial bullet and started. The Guild website had helpfully linked to a number of free tutorials, so I picked one – 1/4″ Mark.com’s quilted bucket and went to work.

Step one.. I selected some unused blocks to use in the body of the bucket. These paper pieced stars set the colour scheme for the finished piece

Step two… I made the bottom of the bucket (this step also involved spray basting my fingers together)

Step three… I did some maths (the hardest part of the whole darn process), deconstructed the blocks and made the body of the bucket.

Step four, five and possibly six… quilted the bucket body, then pinned the bottom piece to the body piece.

Which resulted in this…

Step seven… turned the outside piece inside out and attached handles

Steps eight to twelve… selected lining fabric, cut bottom and side bits, sewed them together, turned them inside out and sewed them to the quilted outer piece. By this stage I was loosing the will to live, but bravely carried on.

Step two hundred and six five… nearly finished… I pulled the quilted part through a small 2 inch whole left in the lining part to reveal this…

My finished bucket. The sides of the bucket are 12 inches and the base is 8 3/4 inches. I think if I was to make it again I would make the sides a little smaller but other than that I am pleased with the finished product. So pleased I took lots and lots of photos…

Really lots and lots…

From lots of different angles….

Just to document the achievement of having made a quilty thing that was not a quilt…