The story of a started quilt......(tutorial included)

Okay so this story starts with an thrift shop buy (well not a thrift shop exactly but Ebay which is pretty much the same thing)...I was lucky enough to win an auction of fabric remnants etc from a ladies clear out for only .99 cents....If that wasn't wow enough when it arrived at my doorstep in the huge bag of fabric was 5 long strips of joined squares - like someone had started a patchwork quilt but it was relegated to the UFO basket. As I was washing and ironing all the bits and pieces I kept thinking what I should do with them, it seemed a shame to not use them as they are and so I decided to finish that quilt.....This is a quick tutorial about how I did it so if you ever come across unfinished patchwork bits and pieces you can do the same ;)

Okay so as I said there were 5 long strips......Now they alone weren't wide enough to make a blanket so I first cut them all in half..............lucky for me the original project starter had sewn 29 squares in each strip.

Right so as you can see it still isn't that wide so I decided to place a long strip in between each patchwork square row.....lucky one of my finds the week before at my local op shop was a fabulous piece of tartan flannel.........So I did a simple job of sewing the strips to the long lengths until I had this:

It soon became even more apparent that the squares were not the same size or even the same shape as each other so next I had to work on squaring up the blanket. It was never going to be perfect but with my trusty tape measure I managed to cut it somewhat square overall :)

Then I had to fold over and sew down the edge I just cut (otherwise my other sewing would start to unravel.....

Here is the result.....

So next I cut a piece of material (in my case simple purple cotton) to size and then attached it as backing to my blanket - I didn't add any blanket wadding to mine but here is where you could insert the wadding to make a puffy blanket.

And then came the most expensive part of the blanket - the binding which I bought new as I didn't have anything else I could use instead - you could also use a wide ribbon here or even bias binding.
I first did a simple straight stitch all around (I mitered the corners) and then a decorative one beside it to finish off......

 And here it is....the finished quilt that cost me less than $10 to make and it meant that another unfinished project out there in the world had been finished, even if it wasn't done by the original starter :)
I'm pretty chuffed with how great it came out!!!!!

xxK