New Skill: Hand Embroidery

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Made this quilt for the baby of a family friend. The father is from the Netherlands and the mother is from the California coast. As much as I knew it was not a super great idea to attempt another double sided quilt, I just had to. I think it’s a wonderful celebration of both cultures all wrapped up in one cozy lap blanket. I have to admit that as someone who has never been to California (but lived in the Netherlands), I spent more time researching and choosing fabrics than I normally do. I even polled several friends who are from there.

The embroidery was actually really fun and simple. I was concerned about how a beginner like myself was going to embroider something as intricate as a bicycle until I came up with an idea that I will definitely use again. I had some fabric that had larger bicycles on it. I cut a square piece around the bike that I wanted to use, pinned it in place where I wanted it to go and then used it as a template to embroider over. The difficult part about this is getting rid of the excess template fabric when you are done. It almost took me longer to do this than it had taken me to do the embroidery. Using a seam ripper, tweezers, small scissors, and a pin, I managed to pull the fabric apart thread by thread until there was no fabric left. I switched from the seam ripper to a simple pin because I did put a small hole into my work that I had to fix later, so be careful if you are going to do that and good luck to you.

New Skill: Triangle Piecing

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After I finished a different quilt, I had several fat quarters left over that never made it into the design. We got invited to a baby shower so I busted those reject fabrics out to create this “makeup the pattern up as you go” triangle quilt. Triangle piecing took a while to get the hang of because the pieces don’t quite line up right if you line them up the wrong way before you sew. That will make sense if you try it.

Trying to line up a double sided quilt is no bueno. 10/10 would not recommend unless you have a helper and a lot of patience. I had to add a green strip on the top and bottom of the front panel to get everything to line up correctly.

New Skill: Hand Sewn Binding.

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This was an interesting project. I wasn’t at my house, worked with my sewing machine on the floor, and my infant was trying to eat everything. As you can imagine, I tried to get it done as fast as I could. I made up the pattern as I went and used the big mermaid panel that I found to save some time. I think that fabric collections with a large panel piece are great for making quilts for babies since you can find so many cute collections nowadays.

New Skill: New pattern/Machine embroidery

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This commissioned herringbone baby blanket quilt was a wild one for me. I followed a pattern for the herringbone section of the quilt. My advice for anyone who is going to attempt this pattern: the way the pieces get cut and laid out can really mess with your brain. It always felt as if I were doing something wrong. I kept stepping back to look at it and saying “that can’t be right”, but I put my trust in the process and the creator of the pattern and everything turned out fine. I’m happy with the way the points came together since I was certain that misalignments would be extremely noticeable with the contrasting colors.

The back of this quilt is an example of how things turn out ok but not super great when you don’t have the right tools. Good news is that I will eventually obtain the tools to better my craft and that the recipients were happy with it. That’s really all that matters anyway.

P.S. I could not get the wrinkles out of that light blue fabric to save my life. I recently invested in some spray starch and it has been amazing. Bonus: it smells like flowers.

New Skill: Stitch in the Ditch Quilting

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As a young adult with no monies and a significant amount of college debt, it was impossible to justify dropping several hundred dollars on a sewing machine, especially since I didn’t have a specific project in mind. I typically have to alter clothing because nothing fits me correctly and was spending hours hand sewing random things that needed fixing or altering and would become frustrated because it would be so much faster if I had a machine.

Enter: the birthday fairies (my parents). They got me a machine for my birthday and I immediately started to work on a quilt, because why not?

New Skill: Fusible Webbing/T-Shirt Quilt/No binding (sew right sides together and flip right side out)

When you have a basket full of old t-shirts that you want to keep but don’t wear, you make a t-shirt quilt. I had no idea what I was doing, but I was determined to make it work. The only t-shirt quilts I could find online were ones where the t-shirts were cut into square blocks, all the same size, and put together like a block quilt. I didn’t like those because they cut into the shirt design and if keeping the design was the reason for making the quilt in the first place then that wasn’t going to work for me.

I decided to cut around the designs on my shirts and lay them randomly on a large piece of light weight fusible webbing. I ironed them as beset I could to the webbing and then used a zigzag stitch around the edges of each piece. I wish I had known how to do more of an embroidery stitch since that was what I envisioned, but it this worked out because it’s a scrappy/outdoor use quilt anyways. It was strange to work with the t-shirts because they slide everywhere and stretch out of shape easily.

I like how this turned out. It’s a bit of a mess, but it’s nice to have a quilt you don’t feel bad using in front of an outdoor fire while you eat s’mores. I figure, it’s just t-shirts, I should be able to wash it a lot and not feel bad about it.

I learned the basics of sewing from my mom. How to use a sewing machine, threading a needle, hand sewing, picking fabric, etc. She made us several halloween costumes over the years and even once helped us follow patterns to make our own pajamas!

I don’t recall ever seeing my dad sit down at a sewing machine, but it was my dad who taught me about piecing and quilting. I can’t remember how it came up, but one day when I was in grade school, he showed my little sister and I how to make quilts. We made one (or maybe even two) small 1 foot by 1 foot tie quilts. Mine was a 3 by 3 block square with blue fabric with frogs on it. I recall proudly laying it out on the top of my dresser as a decoration. I’m not sure where it went, but it’s possible that we sent it to his mom, my grandma. She is the “original” quilter in our family so my dad picked up a few things from her.