Margot’s Baby Quilt

Fabric: Riley Blake Basic Variety Gray and Pink Dots (for quilt top and binding), the backing is called Color Me Happy that I got at one of my local quilt shops (Minding My Ps and Qs).

Pattern: Petal Party from Craftsy

Batting: Warm & Natural 100% Cotton (Yep, went from full poly to full cotton…one extreme to the next! 🙂 )

Machine: Brother CS6000i

This is the second quilt I finished. I finished it back in December. I made this beauty for my friends Sarah and Nic for their baby girl, Margot who is due this year. I loved this quilt from the first time I saw it. As the last one, I was itching for a reason to buy and make this quilt. Luckily I got my reason! 🙂 This one was much easier than the last one and I really should have started this one to improve some of my skills first! Either way, it turned out great. Piecing was pretty easy and I made the blocks relatively quickly. I had a little bit harder time piecing the rows together and making them line up properly. That took a while. The other challenging thing was the blue cord on the pink. I had to sew that on a couple of different times because it didn’t quite turn out right the first time I did it.

Here’s right before I stitched the rows together. Mock up of what it was going to look like. You’ll notice in the finished top that I accidentally rotated a few blocks ways I didn’t originally intend but it still turned out pretty.

After rows were put together and I was testing out backing fabric to see if I liked it.

 

I basted the quilt…which took a lot longer than my last one…I decided to use a 100% cotton batting on this one since it was still soft, but not so lofty. I knew this one was going to be harder to quilt especially if I had used a loftier batting. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as fluffy in the end as I had hoped, but it will be plenty warm!

Quilting took a while as this was quite a large quilt for my machine. The middle of it took a long time, but it taught me many ways to get a large quilt quilted on my little machine. I ended up doing mostly just stitch in the ditch quilting on this. I wasn’t really experienced enough to do much more! On a few blocks I tried to add some design to it and it looked alright. You can tell it was my first time doing it, but it still turned out great!

Here’s after I quilted it and did the binding…still not quite finished!

The last thing was to add her name (I decided I would try to embroider it onto the quilt) and to add the flowers. The flowers were so hard to make. The pattern was kind of vague on how to create the flowers and it mentioned nothing about how to attach them to the quilt. So that was pretty hard to do but I eventually figured it out. For the embroidery, I just used a zigzag stitch with the feed dogs lowered so I could determine how close they were…which created an embroidery stitch. It looks rough, but it worked. Next time I’ll send it off to my aunt for a professional job! 🙂

And here’s the finished product…

Here’s a closeup of the flowers, embroidery, and the different quilting I used on certain blocks.

  

Closeup of the backing fabric:

I loved making this quilt…heck…I love making all my quilts. But I feel extra proud of this one. It was quite a large project to take on for my second quilt and I think I did okay on it. I also love the size of it. It will continue to be of use well beyond baby years. Plus it’s not TOO girly and not TOO baby…so it will grow well. The only thing I would change is I would re-do the buttons with a fabric button or no button at all. These are really big so I’m not too worried about it, but in hindsight, I just don’t like the idea of buttons on a baby quilt.

I’m a Quilter!

Hey! Long time, no see! My baby has taken up the majority of my time these last two (!!!) years so there has been little to no time to blog! But recently I’ve picked up a new hobby…Quilting! I’ve actually found that I love it and I’m pretty decent at it too! I’ve never -really- had a real hobby before, so this is new territory we are covering here.

I purchased my first quilt kit from Craftsy in December 2013. I really only purchased it because I liked the fabric. I’m not sure that I intended on actually making it…but I had hoped to find someone to make it for me! Anyway…it sat around for a couple months until August when I decided to break it out and give it a try. I took Craftsy’s Quilting Quickly class by Jenny Doan. That class was awesome! It seriously taught me almost everything I know about quilting. So, I started the quilt after I had watched enough of the class to at least get started. The rest of the details I will go into when I post about the actual quilt but needless to say, it lit a fire in me! I absolutely love quilting!

So far, I have finished 5 quilts and have another two in the works. I’ve also joined Blossom Heart Quilt‘s Quilting Bee where you make one block a month and send it to someone who will turn all of the blocks into one quilt. Each quilter gets a month to receive blocks in order to make a quilt with. I think it sounds like a lot of fun!

I’ve also planned to do a Hedgehog quilt-a-long with GnomeAngel starting in February. It sounds like it will be a lot of fun! My friend, Barbara (who partly inspired me to get into quilting), is also doing it. It will be fun to do it with a friend!

Well, so long!

i’ll be sharing my quilt stories soon! I have 5 to catch up on!