Blogger’s Quilt Festival – Spring 2010

It’s time for another Blogger’s Quilt Festival, and I really wanted to join in this time, so welcome to anyone arriving from there! The quilt I’m sharing is called Cars and Ponies (I’m good with imaginative names like that!) and I made it at the end of last year.

One of my oldest friends asked me to make this for her soon-to-arrive niece or nephew. It was so, so, so exciting to be asked to make something for someone else – all my previous quilts were gifts to family and family have to be nice about home-made gifts don’t they! But making a quilt for someone else to give as a present – eek! Did I mention I was excited?! Oh and really, really worried about messing it up!

My friend decided on the cars and ponies theme because her sister and her husband are mad about cars and ponies (they have a couple of Shetland ponies) so male or female, the baby was going to have a lot to do with both! As we were on a very tight budget we ended up using a FQ with horseshoes on it by Michael Miller, with the other fabric coming from Ikea.

The cars fabric was lovely to work with, but the other Ikea fabric was kinda coarse. I definitely learnt a lesson in fabric quality with this quilt!

I quilted it by machining a straight line down each of the strips bordering the car squares. I changed the colour depending on the main colour in the fabric which meant a lot of stopping and starting and huge numbers of ends to sew in. But I like how it emphasises the block pattern on the back of the quilt (it’s not really clear in the picture below, but hey, it gives me a reason to post a pic of the back!).

And after all the worrying, my friend and her sister loved how it turned out, which was an awesome feeling!

Then a month or two ago, I had an email from my blogging friend Nancy who was wondering where the cars fabric came from. She doesn’t have an Ikea near her, so we did a fabric swap and she made her own cars quilt (pic down the bottom). She chose a more liberated style and I love how we’ve made similar but different quilts from the same fabric!

So that’s my quilt! Thanks for stopping by and a huge thanks to Amy for all her organisation for the festival!

Completed: The Baby Quilt of Many Redesigns

The label for this quilt says “Hearts and Stars”, but to me it will always be “The Baby Quilt of Many Redesigns” As I was labelling it just now I was thinking back over all the ideas I had for this quilt and I remembered that originally I was going to make a Sunbonnet Sue quilt if the wee one had been a girl. I don’t think I could have made anything more different if I’d tried!

I did fairly minimal quilting – just outlined the solid squares. It’s backed with one of the Moda Love U fabrics and bound in a cute alphabet and spotty blue fabric. Oh and the dark blue solid was once a pillowcase before I needed an emergency injection of fabric!

I couldn’t finish without an attempt at an arty photo! I’ve thought my photos are a bit dull so have be trying to take more interesting ones. I like the way this one looks under the top layer of the quilt to the backing fabric!

WIP: Baby Quilt 6

I’ve finally got back on the quilting wagon, with Baby Quilt 6 or “what, I need to rethink this entire thing again” as I’ve affectionately called it…!

It was originally going to look like this, but with modern fabric so kind of traditional and modern. But after seeing some pics of the wee one in his new home, I realised that his parents are far more modern that I thought so my traditional idea just wasn’t going to cut it.

So after redesigns one, two and three, where I was trying to fit the fabric I’d already bought into a completely different layout, I ended up deciding on doing something inspired by this.

Redesign four happened when I started cutting fabric and realised that I didn’t have enough of the solid so had to add another one (I kind of re-purposed a pillowcase!). And there was nearly redesign five when I thought I didn’t have enough of one of the patterned fabrics, but it turned out I did, just!

All in all, I’d been waking up for weeks thinking about this quilt, debating fabric, layouts etc and by last weekend I’d absolutely had enough. There really is only so long that you can procrastinate before it does your head in, so I spent last weekend in a frenzy of activity putting the thing together! I’ve still got a bit of the binding to sew down, but other than that it’s all good and best of all, there are no more decisions to be made

The Pointy Zigzag Quilt of Torture

I’ve been working on a quilt, provisionally called “Baby Quilt 4″. That was a bit of a boring name, so I finally found a better one. So here is “The Pointy Zigzag Quilt of Torture”, all nice and ready for basting…

Unfortunately I didn’t really think through the directions to iron the seams in, so all those zigzags have nice bunches of seams right at the zigzag points. The result is more akin to a bed of nails than a baby blanket so it’s definitely not suitable for a gift!

This is getting chalked up to experience and I just need to come up with present plan B!

Back with it!

Well, I’m back to feeling somewhat human, wahey! Over the last few days I’ve read so many blog posts and found so many cool new blogs. Without blogland, I think I’d have gone out of my mind with boredom over the last few days, but I have a feeling it could be interesting keeping up with everything I’m now subscribed to!

I’ve been debating colour schemes and fabric for my Baby Jane, but that’s on hold for a few days, because I’ve got a baby quilt to make! The wife of one of my uni friend’s had a boy this morning and I think the wee one definitely needs a quilt!

I’ve had these HST’s lurking in my stash since I made Baby Quilt 3.

I LOVE the stripy fabric and have got a layout worked out. But first I have 42 HST’s to square up, urrgh! Best get to it…

Completed: Cars and Ponies baby quilt

Well, sneaking in as my final finish for 2009 is the Cars and Ponies baby quilt! This is for a friend’s sister whose baby is due in January. I’m glad this is done because I was getting kinda worried that my friend would ring up saying the baby had arrived early and where was the quilt?!

The quilting is straight lines again (I really need to make time to learn FMQ-ing!). The white squares are outlined and then there’s a single line down the centre of each stripe. Pretty simple but seeing as I was stopping and starting at each stripe, I had a LOT of threads to finish off! Not sure I’ll be doing that again in a hurry!

Christmas table runner

I spotted this table runner by Quilting Barbie ages ago and when Quilting Barbie mentioned she might do a tree one for Christmas it set something off in the back of my mind and I’ve now decided to do one with trees and sawtooth stars for my mum’s Christmas pressie.

I still haven’t finished the Cars and Ponies quilt, so that plus this table runner plus the wild flower pincushion (still not started!) plus the frenchy handbag should keep me busy for a while

I’ve been having a bit of a binding dilemma (just for a change – I always seem to be worrying about the binding!) for the Cars and Ponies quilt. I bought what I thought would be great fabric but I wasn’t 100% convinced so ended up procrastinating whilst I umm’d and ah’d over whether to use what I’d bought or get something else. In the end I found something else at the weekend which works so well and I’m now feeling inspired to get the quilting done and the binding on!

Cars and Ponies quilt: Top done

I’ve finished the top for the Cars and Ponies quilt and it’s just too cute!

Now I know what I want to do with the quilting (only being able to do straight lines really narrows the options!) and the back is going to be more of the cars fabric, but I’m pretty stuck as to what to do for the binding. I’d originally planned to use the red horseshoe fabric, because I really like it and the print is a good size for binding, but then it wouldn’t show up against the top edge of the quilt. Is that bad? Should the binding contrast with the fabric it’s against? I dunno! Any ideas would be gratefully received

Cars and Ponies quilt: Blocks done

Well the blocks are done but it hasn’t exactly been plain sailing! I took a chunk out of my finger whilst cutting fabric (mental note – keep all fingers on the ruler), managed to cut assorted fabric to the wrong size and my quick-unpick has seen more action today that it has been for all my previous quilts combined. I think I must be half asleep or something!

Anyway, here are the blocks and some possible layouts. I’m not sure which one to go with so any comments would be gratefully received!

Layout 1 (sort of v-shapes):

Layout 2 (diagonals):

Layout 3 (rows):

Ok, I’ve just spotted another block that needs the quick-unpick treatment *sigh* . I’d best go do that…

WIP Wednesday: Cars and Ponies quilt test block

Here’s my test block for the Cars and Ponies baby quilt. I think it’s turned out pretty well and although I’m still not 100% convinced about some of the fabric, I’m a lot more confident that the quilt will be ok. The car fabric is pretty decent and the red fabric is good quality so I think the layout of a centre square of cars plus a stripe of the red helps anchor the other stripes. At least that’s what I’m hoping

On a more pressing matter, I was reading Naptime Quilter’s latest quilt-a-long post which has a very helpful section on pressing (see what I did there – pressing matter, pressing fabric?! Oh ok, I’ll not give up the day job…). I’ve always pressed seams on the wrong side of the fabric and used two hands, but Cheryl suggests pressing from the right side and not using your second hand so as not to be tempted to pull at the fabric. I tried this out tonight and it seemed to work better than how I used to do it so I’ll be sticking with her method from now on. Thanks for the tip Cheryl!