I apologise for the poor quality of these photos. I grabbed a quick photo with my iPad after laying this quilt on the living room floor, then tried to get some more pics with my phone after it was hung up at work.

I was pleased that the quilt came together pretty much as I envisioned it. I made the heart first, sewing a type of crazy quilt onto a large heart shape cut from batting. I used silver metallic thread for the stitching over the seams, which went far better than I’d hoped. Thanks to YouTube, I found out that metallic threads need a larger-eyed needle and a looser tension, so I put in a 90/14 Universal (didn’t have a topstitch one) and dialled my top tension from 6 to 3. It worked!

After that, I sewed the heart to the cloud fabric, first using a straight stitch around the shape close to the edge and then adding a wide zigzag.

I had a couple of packages of silver trims to make the heart look like a balloon, with a string coming down and continuing off the edge of the quilt. The free motion quilting says “Love is in the air”, and the flowers are just strips of fabric gathered along one edge and fastened down with buttons.

It took me a few hours each day from Friday through Sunday. On Monday, it was hung up at work and my manager gave me another project to do. We have some metal purse frames that aren’t selling, so I brought one home and checked out YouTube for how to make a bag with it. The instructions that came with the frame were not very helpful!

I ended up using a Rockstars and Royalty video, mostly following what she did except I made darts rather than boxing the bottoms of the bag.

Well, the air in my sewing room must have been blue by the time I finished sewing in that handle! Talk about fiddly! My needle kept coming unthreaded, the fabric kept moving out of the frame and I had to redo stitches, and at one point the thread snapped when I was only halfway done one side.

It’s done now and if I make another I think I’ll go back to a Debbie Shore video I watched that constructed the bag differently and may result in a neater junction at the hinges.