A long time in the making.

Back in the very first year of Angela's Rainbow Scrap Challenge - is that three or four years ago now? -  she did a give-away and I was lucky enough to win a special ruler. I've no idea what it was called, but it cuts one blade of a windmill. I was delighted to have this ruler as I'd used that idea for my very first quilt, when I'd cut templates out of paper.

So I started cutting sets of fabric using the ruler every time I had a scrap that was the right size. And when I had enough I started to piece them together.

When I made my first quilt I had my sewing machine in the spare bedroom, so I was able to lay the pieces out on the bed and lift them straight to my machine. Now however, I have a proper sewing room  and at the time had nowhere to lay pieces out. This is the sort of quilt that you have to lay out in advance of starting to sew. So all the pieces went back in the box.

Then, last year, I got a small design wall put up and at last I was able to get started on laying the quilt out.

I finished it last week, in time to give to a very dear friend who has been in hospital for the last two weeks and is likely to be there for a while longer yet. I haven't been able to visit her as I've had such a nasty chest infection, but I was able to send the quilt in via another friend.

So here, after a long time in the making, and almost as long in the telling, is the finished quilt. And I grabbed a rare moment of dry weather and sunshine to take a photograph outside.

It's a lap size quilt, the best size I think for just laying over your legs if you're feeling a bit under the weather but not actually freezing cold. As always these days when I'm making a scrap quilt, I used it to practice my quilting. I couldn't think of different quilting patterns for every single windmill, but I think I've got about twenty five different patterns in there.