Baby Quilt Animal Party - Part 3

I finished the baby quilt today.  Since all that I had to do was the binding I typically can work on that at night when I don't need the best of light.  I'm pleased with how it turned out despite the difficulty with the way the panel was printed.  I did send an e-mail to the manufacturer Kaufman and I did get an e-mail that they received my e-mail and were looking into the matter.  That was over a week ago and I haven't heard anything since so I suspect I won't hear back as to what happened that caused the panel to be printed that it was off grain by 1 1/2" between the top and bottom.

I'm still working on the Art & Cold Cash project and should have that completed for next weekend just in time for the other gal to take it and start the beading.  Since that involves free motion quilting on a very dark indigo hand dyed fabric I find I'm best to work on that in the day light hours.

Baby Quilt Animal Party - Part 2

I finished the quilting on the Animal Party quilt today. It was a simple grid quilting that I did on this quilt. I started out with a 6" grid in aqua coloured thread using a saddle stitch. This stitch is a more defined stitch than a normal straight stitch in that the needle goes back and forth while creating it. Then I created a second grid in a mango coloured thread that was 1 1/4" to the right of the aqua grid lines. Finally a third gird in grass green thread that was 1 3/4" to the left of the aqua grid lines.

One thing that I learned about the saddle stitch, at least with my machine, is that you can't go fast while doing it, or it tries to revert back to an almost normal straight stitch. I think what it is, is when the speed of the machine is too fast, it doesn't have enough time to go back and forth properly. I had to go back and redo a couple of the aqua rows of stitching because they were not well defined.

Here is a close up of one of the blocks and you can see what the grid looks like. The other nice thing about doing this grid pattern is that I locked the stitching at the beginning and end so I don't have to sit there and tie off and feed all the ends through the inside of the quilt. All the ends are at the edge of the quilt which will be covered over with binding so that should protect the small ends that are left. This makes for a fairly quick way of getting a quilt quilted. The interest is added by using multiple colours of thread and a thicker stitch.

Here is what the back of the quilt looks like like. This fabric is so cute.

I would definitely use this method of quilting for any charity quilts I have to do or if I need to get something out on a tight dead line. So I just have to make up the binding and get that sewn on and the quilt is finished.

That will have to wait about a week or so since I have to get the last bit of quilting done on the Art & Cold Cash quilt http://felinesandfibrearts.blogspot.com/search/label/Art%20and%20Cold%20Cash because the gal who is going to be doing the beading on it will be ready to take it in a couple of weeks.

Baby Quilt Animal Party - part 1

I'm making another baby quilt and for the most part I'm a believer of keeping things easy and simple when it comes to baby quilts. Typically they are used and abused, so I don't feel like spending hundreds of hours of my time making them, but still want to make something to celebrate the birth of a friends' child. Also the quilt is for the child so they should be able to use it while they are growing up instead of it being folded up in some drawer for safe keeping because there was too much work put into it.

I like using panels since usually all it means is sewing on a border and you are ready to quilt. I saw the new line of kids fabrics from Robert Kaufman called Animal Party and really liked the nice bright colours and cute animals on the panel they had. I figured this would be another simple quilt to make until the fabric arrived in the mail.

As you can see from the picture above of the panel print it is based on a wonky log cabin idea. But when I got my panel, not only were the blocks in the panel wonky, the whole panel was wonky. At first I was cursing the fabric shop that I had ordered my fabric from for cutting the panel crooked. So I laid out the panel on the table to see what I could do with it and took a couple of my large cutting rulers to see just how off things were. This is when I actually noticed that the panel was printed crooked in relation to the weave of the fabric and there was no way to cut the panel so it would be on grain. Usually Kaufman fabrics are really of good quality so I'm not sure what happened with this lot.

So I decided to cut out each of the blocks from the panel and add an additional strip of fabric around each block as you would in a wonky log cabin and then square the final block. I had bought some small circle fabric for an inner border and for some reason I bought 1 yard instead on my normal 1/2 yard that I would for an inner border for this type of quilt. Thus I had enough fabric to create proper squared blocks.

I'm now in the process of quilting this. I'm keeping that very simple on this one. I'm doing a grid of 6" squares of straight line quilting in an aqua thread but I'm using a thicker stitch called a saddle stitch to give it a bit more emphasis. Then I'm going to quilt with a mango coloured thread another grid that is 1 1/4" to one side of the aqua grid and finally a third grid of a grass green thread that is about 2" to the other side of the aqua grid.

Baby Quilt - Part 2

I finished the Beatrix Potter baby quilt today. It turned out quite cute, but then I can't take all the credit for this one, it's those adorable pictures that make this quilt. I just did a stitch in the ditch for the panel portion since I didn't want to mess with the art work.

I found a nice bunny silhouette for the border (see below) so it was an easy quilting and sewing job on my part. They didn't make any of the green fabric that was used in the panel so I ended up using a Robert Kaufman Fusions 5573 Celery for the inner border. It turned out to be pretty good match considering that the Beatrix Potter fabric is from Cranston Village. The back of the quilt is the same pattern as the big border but in yellow flannel while the top of the quilt is just regular cotton. So now to wait for the arrival of the little one in May.

Baby Quilt

I have a baby quilt to get done for May and I've decided to make life real easy for myself. I picked up this lovely Beatrix Potter panel and I'm just going to add a small inner border and a regular boarder and call it a done deal. I will do a pseudo "stitch in the ditch" to outline the blocks in the panel and find a nice baby motif for the main border. There are times when it's nice to keep things simple.