This is the second of two quilts with a Paddington Bear theme, both from kits purchased at my quilt guild's auction. I pieced the first kit, purchased at a September/October 2020 sale, with no intended recipient. Once I learned that someone I knew was pregnant, I backed, quilted and bound it. (See post for Paddington Counts dated 8/28/21.) Then I learned she was expecting twins. I would need a second quilt, similar but not the same. I was extremely lucky to find another Paddington themed quilt kit at a second of my guild's sale mid-July, different fabrics, but similarly designed out of a cloth book panel as was the first. This kit, titled There Goes Paddington, had the fabric for a larger quilt, 56" x 56", but I knew I could leave out or pare down the borders to make it the same 48" x 48" of the first quilt. The pattern was not included — it had come from a 2008 quilting magazine — but I could wing it by cutting out the book pages and making quarter square triangle blocks to alternate. This quilt was meant to be. Note that it had come from the stash of a woman who had purchase it from a quilt shop in Hyannis MA.
On a lark, anyway, when I got home, I googled the magazine to see if I could buy a back issue but the magazine was no longer being published. Undaunted, I went to eBay and was able to buy the pattern from a vendor there. The vendor was https://www.ebay.com/usr/themidnightcrafterkytoo. The pattern pages, neatly trimmed and slid within a page protector along with a coupon for future purchases, arrived in the mail within a couple days. Using the coupon I could not resist buying four other patterns from the site, too, from the same era. Oh, well. Quilts from those patterns may be the topic of another post... But I digress; back to Paddington.
The quilt uses thirteen images. The panel for a cloth book has twelve images from the inside pages plus four images from the outer slightly larger cover pages. Cover pages are the top row of images in the following photo. At the far right are instructions for constructing the book (folded under in the photo).
I dutifully cut apart the twelve inner images and had to stretch, tug, and steam a few crooked ones to put on them on grain so I had squares to work with instead of rhombuses.
There was no choice but to pull the thirteenth image from the cover. The cover is taller by having a wider stripe in the frame. Trimming the extra height was no problem and made the stripe the same width as the border in the inner pages.
The cover is wider by having a wider image. How to handle the wider image?
I chose to take a tuck in the right side of the "Feeding the birds" block near the striped frame. Flipping over the block,
I drew two lines on the wrong side to indicate how much fabric to "remove".
I sewed in a tuck on the far right and sacrificed some of that brown building. Because I placed the stitching line right next to the striped border, it is not at all noticeable as missing. I was lucky I could also avoid the text of the caption.
Next to make were the yellow/red hourglass blocks, also called quarter square triangles. The yellow tossed bear fabric was random enough it did not read as directional but the red paw print fabric had a definite side to side or up-and-down directionality so I had to be careful on how I laid out the hourglasses. I only had to remake two QSTs to get all the red paw prints facing the same way, up and down, even when rotated 90°.
When it came to assembling the center twenty-five blocks, I decided the relative positioning by having Paddington face the centerline of the quilt. I was lucky that there were three blocks where he is facing straight forward so I chose them for the center column. Otherwise five right-facing Paddingtons went on the left and five left-facing Paddingtons went on the right.
Next up was the border decision. Since I wanted the quilt the same size as the baby's twin, I knew I had to reduce it by 4" on all four sides to get to 48" square from 56" square. I immediately eliminated the blue border and had to decide which portion of the striped fabric to keep. I definitely wanted the Paddingtons in the green, red, and blue raincoats with their wide brimmed Sou'wester rain hats and the striped borders on one or both sides. I had to eliminated some combination of the yellow band that read "Please look after this bear", the red band with face and name tags, the green bands with rick-rack, or the blue band with suitcases and sandwiches.
Size-wise, what worked out best was to cut a seam allowance above the blue suitcase row, leaving two bordering strips of stripes around the line of Paddingtons and a partial yellow at the bottom. That yellow at the very outer edge would be covered by the binding. I was OK with this. The yellow band, instead of being cheerful, reminded me a bit of the yellow tape at a crime scene so I was glad to cover it up. Then when I researched the following tidbit about Paddington's origins I was a bit saddened.
Paddington Bear made his first appearance in children's literature in 1958 in a book titled A Bear Called Paddington, written by British author Michael Bond.
In the first story, Paddington is found at Paddington railway station in London by the Brown family, sitting on his suitcase with a note attached to his coat that reads "Please look after this bear. Thank you." Bond has said that his memories of newsreels showing trainloads of child evacuees leaving London during World War II, with labels around their necks and their possessions in small suitcases, prompted him to do the same for Paddington.
That narrow blue suitcase row was an acceptable substitute filled in for the wider blue border I'd had to eliminate. Selecting blue also allowed for me to use blue as the cornerstones, two plain and two from the directions portion of the panel – Paddington and a plate of sandwiches.
Once assembled, I chose straight forward FMQ patterns, outlining the Paddington bear figures in the blocks and along the border. Here are some samples of the blue cornerstones and blocks. Blue binding went well with them, too.
When I quilted the border I traced around each Paddington freehand but used a ruler to help keep my stitching as straight as possible along the striped edges.
Because I wanted the twin quilts to have similar names, I titled this one Going Places to coordinate with Counting Stuff. Here are the labels.
The backing of the quilt is a cheery, pale blue Paddington print, that actually came with the quilt kit; usually backing is extra. I show the back twice here, once for color trueness and once shadowed a bit to display the FMQ pattern.
Going Places will soon be going places after I wash it and mail it off.
Just like the twin's quilt
Counting Stuff, Going Places has a couple leftover blocks from the book's cover. Shall they be a pillow...? A pocket or an appliqué on the back...? A tote bag...? A quilter's mind is never quiet and her self-assigned jobs are never done!
