First Quilt

Over a year ago, my brother and sister in-law got me a sewing machine. Somehow in their crafty brains, they had stored the information - that must have been mentioned somewhere, at some time - that I had always wanted to sew, and in particular I have always wanted to quilt. I actually had quilting books and fabric in the house before I even had a machine! I just love BLANKETS in general. We have never really put away the children's favourite baby blankets, and they come out on rainy days, sick days, or any day that feels particularly cuddly. :-)

Within a month or two of having the machine, a good friend of mine here was beginning on HER first quilt, and so we embarked on the journey together. She finished 8 or 9 months before me, but in typical fashion, I undertook a project much too ambitious for my skill level. It has taken a loooong time, but I learned a lot along the way. Kudos to the internet, tutorials and youtube videos. I basically taught myself what I needed to know every step of the way, with help from Andrea and my quilting friend Tina.

So in spring of last year I was having lots of fun picking out fabric and deciding on a pattern for the quilt. I decided on a simple square patchwork quilt, 8 blocks by 8 blocks. It was not meant for a bed covering, but more of a lap quilt, for at least 3 laps ;-) This fabric was the inspiration for the whole quilt:

It has all the colours that I love - various shades of blue and purple, with pinks and green as well. Since this quilt was entirely for me, I embraced the palate and began to build a serious fabric stash. Ozayr was extremely helpful, because as much as I love colour and respond to colours, I am not that great at putting them together.

Then I set to work cutting my 8 inch by 8 inch squares and figuring out how to put them together. (Ozayr's hint: Squint!)

Once I had the basic configuration figured out, it was time to piece them together so that I had a quilt top. I did this row by row, then sewed the rows together.

Then I had to assemble the quilt "sandwich" - the top, the batting and the backing fabric. This took place on my living room floor...

Then it all needed to be pinned together. I think there were over 200 safety pins in all. I ran out at one point and had to run to Byerly's at 11 o'clock at night to get more. Because you just can't leave your whole living room floor covered in quilt for very long when you have kids. :-)

 

Next came the most arduous part, which probably took me from September of last year until just a few weeks ago. First I sewed along the grid lines of the quilt, so every square was quilted along each edge. And then the pattern called for free motion quilting INSIDE of each square - of which I had 64. I had never tried to free motion quilt before, where you use a darning foot on your machine and you can move the quilt around freely (not just forwards and backwards) to make designs that *can be* very creative. You can see some examples here and here. This technique is pretty daunting because the stitch length and everything is determined by how quickly and deftly you are moving the quilt around. If you stop moving the quilt for a second, you've just put 3 stitches in the exact same spot. If you move too quickly, your stitches are too long. In general, my stitches were never even or consistent, especially since I only ever quilted a block or two at a time. But it does lend itself to a lot of creativity and I tried to make every block different. Some I outlined the design on the fabric to make it stand out more...

and on others I tried to add some contrast to the pattern...

I did try my hand at traditional stipling, but I found it hard to keep the design even across the whole square, even if it was only 8x8!

Now that it's done, you can see the variety on the back of the quilt, though it's only really noticeable in certain light...

The part I've been working on for the last month or so has been the binding. I really didn't want to screw up the quilt on the very last stage, so I did  A LOT of practice binding on scraps of quilt. In the end too, I ended up changing my binding fabric from a matching floral to this striped fabric:

So just yesterday I tacked on the binding and machine sewed it:

Traditionally the binding is put on by hand, but honestly I just don't have that kind of time! If you hand-sew it properly you can hide the stitches along the edge of the binding, but honestly I don't mind the way it turned out, it might be one of my favourite parts of the quilt now that it's done.

So there you go! The loooooong story of my first quilt. The next few projects are already planned and the fabric is bought - let's hope it doesn't take nearly as long this time!!!!! :-)