Sewing - Mini Quilt

I took part in a mini-quilt swap recently. I've had to wait to post until the recipient confirmed receipt of the quilt, but now she has it, here it is!

I used the cathedral windows ironing method.

What that means is that I made 25 large squares, fold the corners in to the centre, press, fold the corners again, press again, then sew together in strips.

I ordered a set of pre-cut squares to fill the windows with, in a rainbow pack. I then planned out the squares to progress in a pattern from red to violet, approximately.

Once this was ready, I hand sewed the windows themselves, including the edge windows which do not have anything in them. I also sewed the points together. Had I thought about it, I would have sewn the windows in such a way that I could have used the ends to sew the points together, but I didn't always do that, which meant more ends to weave in.

I'm pleased with the effect though, and my recipient likes it too, which is the most important part!

Sewing - Memory Quilt

My sister asked me if I would make a memory quilt for my niece's 2nd birthday.
Despite having only made one quilt before, I agreed.

A short time later, my sister provided me with a massive box of baby clothes from my niece's first 3 months or so. I selected a few specific items with fun logos on. The centerpiece was to be the baby-grow with "Born in 2013" on it. My sister told me that she especially liked a baby-grow with some clouds on, so I combined those to produce a fab center square, as shown to the right.

Because the baby clothes are all made from jersey, which is stretchy, I ironed interfacing onto the back of all of the pieces before cutting them out. This has two benefits: it stops the stretching (mostly) and also means that you can draw on the seam-lines.

I made a few other combined blocks to try to produce 5 columns of approximately the same width.


Once I'd finished piecing the quilt, I had to find some nice backing fabric for it. I found this lovely poly-cotton with fun animals on, and after checking with my sister, this was deemed to be appropriate.

I then stitched a 1/4" seam around each block. Every single block, including the small ones. that made for a lot of ends to weave in, but it looks really nice.

I had some grey binding left over from my last quilt, so I decided that this would be a good bet for this quilt too. (I'm very fond of the Klona cotton)

I'm really pleased with how this came out, and my sister loves it too!

Sewing - My First Quilt

I have finished my first ever quilt. I decided to make this prior to making a memory quilt for my sister as I didn't want to make my beginners' mistakes on her precious baby clothes!

I bought the Gone Fishing panel from Benartex to use as the main blocks, and then cut some smaller squares from orange and grey fabric to finish the design. The back is done with the grey, and I also made my own bias binding from the grey fabric too.

I used a couple of tutorials to help me through this, here they are:

Piecing basics
Quilting basics
Making bias binding
Attaching bias binding with a machine

Things I've learned through this process:
1. Matching up corners of blocks is really hard! I understand why so many quilts have border strips in them now. For my sister's quilt I might think about staggering the blocks to reduce the amount of corners I need to match.
2. Quilting is quite hard too! I only did "stitch in the ditch" and it still took concentration and time!
3. Adding binding is also tough because of the layers!
4. Despite 1, 2 and 3, it's totally worth it, and addictive! I'm having to be really strict with myself about buying all the fabric for a new quilt, not to mention a new sewing machine! Ha! I'll have to console myself with some other sewing instead.