In 2018 I joined a sew-a-long hosted by GnomeAngel on Instagram. A lot of stores across the globe were involved because they were selling the kits to be able to join the sew-a-long. (look up #ROUNDWEGOSAL and #ROUNDWEGOWITHSUEDALY to see what everyone else was doing)
The Sew-a-long was a 12 month participation where you signed up to Sue Daly’s Round We Go Block of the Month programme. It is an English Paper Piecing project (which is a hand sewing technique where you baste fabric to papers then typically use a whip stitch to join the pieces together). Each month I would receive papers and instructions to make 4 blocks of one design. At the end of the 12 months you will have a full sized quilt. Some shops also provided fabric with the papers but from the beginning I knew I wanted to use my collection of Downton Abbey fabrics.
The Downton Abbey fabrics were released over a couple of years by Andover fabric and each main character had their own collection of 8-10 fabrics. The Dowager Countess, Lady Mary, Lady Sybil, Lady Rose, Lady Edith, Lord and Lady Grantham, Downton Downstairs, Downton at Christmas and Downton Abbey Egypt. This last one is the only collection I didn’t manage to collect. On top of these collections were tags and labels, Downton Abbey text and Downton Abbey Logo prints.
Due to the workload I was quickly building up in 2018 (and this is where my fatigue levels started building), I very quickly was left behind in the progress of other participants. Then in 2020 I made the goal to complete some of my works in progress and this was the one that was easiest to grab and I knew there was a finite end to the project. Then I discovered the 100 day project hashtag (#100DAYPROJECT) on instagram and decided that my Round we Go quilt was going to be the project of choice. I made a conscious effort for 100 days to progress the quit every day.
And now all 48 circles are complete and ready to have their papers removed.
Now all I need to do is sew these 48 circles to 48 squares then sew the squares together. My plan is to have a custom quilting design on the piece which I know is going to be more expensive than my typical pantograph but I have visions of this having a very traditional feather type quilting to match the theme of the Downton Abbey fabrics.
I will keep you posted on how that goes as hopefully this will be finished before Christmas.
See you on Saturday
Faerydae Stitches 