Wednesday, 19 September 2012

Baby quilt completed


I seem to have developed a habit of starting a quilt/project and half way through deciding it doesn't meet the intended purpose anymore. The baby quilt I started in the Ten Little Things range has now gone on hold for the older brother's birthday present instead of for the new baby. 

So a few days before the baby actually arrived (early!) I started a new design, so needless to say it wasn't finished on time. 

A simple design using a set of fat quarters I have had sitting around for a little while. There were 10 fat quarters in the set but I only selected the brightest ones so I only had four fat quarters. The blocks ended up at 15" square but by this point I was running out of fabric so to make it a bit longer I added two extra, thinnish rows. This is how the front turned out:




Hearing so much about pieced backs and watching Elizabeth Hartman's Craftsy workshop Creative Quilt Backs on the subject made me use up all the scraps I had left (which wasn't very much in the end). So I created a rather narrow row of odd sized strips to break up the off white solid I was using.




I had pretty much finished piecing the front and back when the baby arrived a few days earlier than the due date. But the quilting held me up considerably! I started by doing a square spiral in the big colour blocks and then I free machine quilted a meandering pattern over the off-white area. I was really pleased with how the pattern went, and really liked the back of the quilt.



I am thankful I was limited by the amount of fabric I had and didn't make it any bigger as I found it tricky maneuvering it through the arm of my sewing machine. I think this is the biggest quilt I have machine quilted! And probably the most FMQ I have done too.

Anyway, the quilt has been handed to it's new owner, who being only 2 weeks old, was not exactly impressed but his mum thought it was wonderful. So that makes me happy :)

And we are being sooo lucky with the weather at the moment. It's hard to believe it is late September with temperatures in the high 20s. 

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