Stitching in the Barn

  Finished August 2020. Inspired by Waves by Jenny Doan here . Appliques available as free clip art here . Fabric from my stash.

Inspired by a quilt by Marti Michell from her Craftsy/Bluprint class Machine Quilting in Sections Fabric is Blast Off! by Connecting Threads and stash fabric. 50 inches by 50 inches. Finished January 2020.   Front     Back  

So I was super excited about being done with the quilt and just needing to add the binding. I hadn't done binding in a long time, well over a year, and forgot how wide to cut it. I cut my binding 2 inches. I put the strips together, pressed it and sewed it to the front with a quarter inch seam allowance. I don't hand sew binding on except for maybe my first quilt which was a table runner.  When I turned the binding over to the back it didn't reach past the stitching line! I thought if I glued it down I might be able to stitch it down. I didn't use a fine tip and I was super frustrated gluing down the binding. I even used an iron to speed it up. I am never doing that again and it took forever! I stopped gluing with maybe 25 inches left and just used my wonder clips, which I have plenty of. I started by straight stitching about 10 inches to see if the stitching was catching in the back. It wasn't. I was so close to finishing. Then I remembered, "Babies don...

 I described a bit on how I made this quilt larger in the last post. If you look closely at the photo of the front, in the corner at the edge, the batting shows. I cut some small pieces from the scrap and folded over 2 sides. I used glue to stick it down and appliqued the pieces through all the layers. Why did I do it this way? Two reasons: 1) "Babies don't care", 2) I didn't want to trim the sides down to match. The quilt came out remarkably square and I don't currently have the space to trim this. I added the last two borders mostly as described in Marti Michell's book Machine Quilting in Sections. The final corner looks good enough for a preschooler. You can only tell that the piece below the red planet is appliqued on because the glue is still there and shining from the light. It shouldn't be there anymore because I washed it. Also the quilting line doesn't go to the end because I decided to do this after I quilted it. I...

One of my favorite sewing You Tube channels is The Stitch TV . One of the hosts, Pam, is someone I admire. She's an engineer and a quilter, something I'm aiming to achieve within the next couple of years. She is no nonsense and just unapologetically herself. One piece of advice, or more accurately tag phrase, she gives, I embraced recently: "Babies don't care." That simple phrase freed me from worrying over making the perfect baby quilts. It allowed me to feel free to try new techniques and fudge some trouble spots I came across while making a quilt for my 2.5 year old nephew. I'll post the completed quilt in another post, I still need to get some good pictures, but I'd like to describe some of the things I've done to this quilt.

I'm going to change up my blog soon. I like the newer modern template choices.  Today's post is more documentation for my process on this quilt. This is probably TLDR. Worked on fitting the quilt to the Marti Michell Perfect Patchwork Templates for making Drunkard's Path blocks in 3 to 4 inches. I had these, they'll make cutting easier and I haven't used them in a while. To make them fit the quilt, I had to make my blocks 7 inches finished and use a 6 by 6 block layout. I use EQ7 for designing so changing it up is easy.  I will need 36 blocks, 18 with black pie sub-blocks and 18 with bright pie sub-blocks. I need 72 HST which divide into 8 sets of 9 different colors. I can also evenly divide the number of Drunkard's Path blocks into 9 so I trimmed my fabrics down to 9 from 15 in the last post. All of these are from my stash. Pretty good picture but the greens got lost. I'll get 8 HST from each color and 8 Drunkard's Path sub-blocks...

At some point I bought 2 charm packs of Island Hopping by Connecting Threads that were a group of 16 fabrics and decided to make a baby quilt from the squares. I put both packs on my design wall with the packs split evenly in the middle. I changed the placement for a week until I found one that was balanced and pleasing. Sewed it together and got a couple of fabrics to round it out to a decent size for a baby a long time ago. Meanwhile life happened and this quilt has been intended for 2 babies and will end up for a third being born this week. I'm really happy with it. I quilted it around the beginning of August 2019 with an orange peel motif in the blocks and swags in the first border. I couldn't figure out what to do in the last border that wouldn't be too dense. While I was sick in bed recently, I came across a way to quilt a braid design that was simple, fast and not dense. It worked great! I finished the quilting, trimmed the front and batting, then turned t...