experiment

I finally got around to finishing this. It was an experiment in all possible ways, from the piecing to the quilting and binding.

My first attempt at free motion quilting. The stitching in the back is not very tight and no matter how much I fooled around with the tension on my machine I could not get it right.

As for the binding, I just left some extra backing all around and used that, folding it over and stitching everything up nice and tight.

serendipity baby quilt

This quilt has been almost finished for months, and I finally finished up the binding and labeled it this past weekend.

Little Agata has not been born yet but we are leaving for the US soon and I was afraid I wouldn't have time to get her name on the quilt before we left. If my friend ends up giving her a different name, the label can be removed and replaced easily enough.

It measures 83 x 108 cm (33 x 43 in), just the right size for the baby carriage, and I made it so that when she is using the quilt and the top is folded down, you can see her name. I thought that would look so sweet in a baby carriage, and one thing I love about Italy is that everyone here uses baby carriages!

Glad this is done, but it means I am behind on the quilt top for the massive queen size quilt I have been working on. It needs to be finished by June 2nd for the Naked Bed Challenge and I might not make it.

But not for lack of trying! I am just very, very slow...

take me to the park

And my second one done.

I used a Sherbet Pips charm park and a bunch of polka dots (mostly Bliss), plus some Kona red and aqua and embroidery on white. It's 104 cm x 149 cm (approximately 41 x 59 inches).

I am pretty pleased with how it turned out. There was about a week there where I wasn't sure if I liked the quilt top or not, but once it was finished with the red and aqua border and the back started coming together, I decided the whole thing worked. And I love all the sweet, sweet details. They are the best part of this quilt.

I quilted it in diagonal lines through the charm squares and then a squiggly line through the red border. It was my first attempt at free motion quilting and I found it a little stressful! It didn't turn out perfectly, but it's not too bad.

The binding. Gah! I have so much trouble with the binding. I spend more time picking out stitches than I do putting them in. This is the method I use and her quilts look sooooo much better. Oh well. Hopefully with time.

Except for the snails, I used embroidery patterns by Aneela Hooey, the designer of the fabric, which I bought at her Etsy shop. I don't know how my amateur stitches will hold up over time (and in the wash) but they were fun to do and I think they add a little special something to a simple charm square quilt.

If you're wondering what's with all the pictures (sorry) it's because I won't be keeping this one and I wanted something to remember it by.

Ooops! Almost forgot! The back is the pink polka dots with a few of the gray/white polka dot squares and another pink snail.

cars and rockets

And the stars aligned so it could be finished.

Stats:
Size: 135 cm square (slightly over 53 inches)
Time it took: about a month
Number of times I had to read the instructions for continuous bias binding: 100
Number of times I scratched my head and wondered if it would actually work: 99
Number of times I inspected the binding I'd attached, realized it looked like crap, but decided to leave it anyway: 1

The cars and rockets and the citron and blue dots are all Birch organic cotton. I ended up throwing in some orange from my small (but rapidly growing) stash to add a little warmth.

The batting is cotton too, and I will never go back to synthetic batting after discovering the joy that is cotton.

The back is a yard of Kona tangerine, pieced with some white, a few squares of robots and rockets, plus few small scraps.

The binding is blue Truck Stop dots.

Except for the shoddy binding, it's not too bad.

At the start, it was meant to be a quilt for my five-year-old, but about halfway through he decided he wanted to share with his little brother and so I made it out to them both. Hopefully they won't notice the mistakes.

my first completed quilt

I am so proud. It is the tiniest little thing. A doll quilt, basically. But it is mine! And it is completed. And I kind of love it.

This is my favorite block:

This is the back, a single wonky star:

I followed the wonky star tutorial I found on The Silly Boodilly, which Film in the Fridge also links to, and it was very simple and fun. My husband liked it a lot and asked for a quilt made up completely of stars, but my five-year-old did not care for the wonky stars at all and went so far as to instruct me to make everything even on his quilt - which is still in the design stage - and not crooked, like on this one.

It was very much a learning process, and making a bunch of completely different blocks taught me a little more about construction than I would have learned from my simple square quilt.

There are tons of glaring mistakes:

In my eagerness, I neglected to cut all those little threads and now when I hold the quilt up to the light, I can see little blue threads through the white fabric. Not pretty.

Also, I thought it would be easier to square everything as I stitched (??) or after the fact, only to realize that maybe such approximate cutting wasn't such a good idea.

I definitely need to work on my quilt sandwich basting skills as well. When it came time to quilt some areas, I had little pouches of fabric with nowhere to go. Whoops!

Lastly, my sewing machine isn't the greatest and I often have to rethread. There is a little area in the piecework where the seam is already loose. And I haven't even washed it yet...

But I enjoyed the process so much that I went out for some sashing fabric for my abandoned nine square quilt - I couldn't wait for my fabric to arrive from the US!

It is very exciting the way everything comes together, one bit at a time, from putting the pieces together, assembling the layers and then quilting. I had a lot of fun trying out different quilting lines and patterns and I loved stitching on the binding at the end.

I think I might be hooked.