baby quilts – Knit-Spin-Quilt

Back to Quilting

It’s been a little while since I’ve quilted — I’ve been under the weather for about a year now (long story, but I’m on the mend) and I’ve been focused on bags, because small projects were all I’ve had the attention span for.

But this past week, the quilting bug bit me again, and I decided to rearrange my sewing space, and try a baby quilt.

Pardon the untidiness: this photo was taken mid-batch of bags for the Moms and Makers Market (see previous post or my Instagram!)

I grabbed a pack of charm squares, a tutorial from Elizabeth Hartmann, and off I went!

I used an old thrifted sheet for the backing and cut a queen batting in quarters, so I suppose there are three more baby quilts in my future!

The quilting was all done by eye with a walking foot — I just let myself stitch where it looked appropriate, and see what happened! I’m quite pleased.

The backing isn’t quite as pretty — there are a couple of places where the top thread (white) pops through because my tension wasn’t quite right — but overall, I’m delighted with it.

Now to find it a new home! I’m thinking about putting it up on Etsy to help me fundraise for the Hispanic Federation, because god knows Puerto Rico still needs help!

Finished Penny Patch Quilt!

I FINALLY finished my Penny Patch quilt. Rachel at Stitched in Color started a quilt-along about a year ago and I cut fabric and stitched a quilt top and even machine quilted the whole thing and then… well, then I got hung up on binding it.

But I finished it last Sunday, and I love it. Here it is on my kitchen table:

I grid-quilted it, free-handing it with a walking foot on my Brother P1500Q straight-stitch machine:

And I used a blue and orange backing, stretching the blue gingham I had by adding a center orange panel:

I’ve also been cleaning out my closets, and discovered that I have a lot of quilts that I’ve finished that I just have no use for — they don’t match my personal aesthetic, I made them just to make them, or they’re for babies, and I don’t have a baby. So I’ve put them on Etsy.

Longtime blog readers will recognize two quilts I made in 2012. If you like one of these, and use the code KNITSPINQUILTREADER, you’ll get 10% off.

As before, all income in September and October of 2015 go directly to a donation to the JHU CTY Scholars program!

Edited to add: linking up to TGIFF!

Two-Finish Friday

These are both gift quilts: one for a friend and her husband and one for a new baby. Here they are all folded up, about to be packed and mailed:

The first quilt I finished was made up of hourglass blocks. I pieced them all over the summer on my Singer 66, and then they sat, and sat, and sat over the fall, because I didn’t have time to finish it until the semester was over. But now it’s done!

The backing is a boat print, because the mother and the grandparents all sail. You can see in this picture that I quilted a simple diagonal grid 1/4″ on each side of the hourglass blocks.

I used a black pezzy print for the binding because I didn’t want to emphasize any particular color from the front. I think it works! I wish I had more of this fabric in stash to do the same in the future — I’ll just have to keep an eye out for similarly useful prints. I attached the binding by stitching it down twice. On the back you see two lines of stitching:

On the front, you only see one, because the other is hidden at the intersection of the binding and the quilt:

The other quilt is for friends of mine, because they live in northern England and it gets coooooold! For this one I used a pattern by Elizabeth Hartmann: her New Wave Quilt.

I cut my fat quarters very, very carefully, and had enough extra pieces to showcase the wave pattern on the back of the quilt as well:

This one I quilted by stitching in the ditch along the edges of the white sashing. I stitched smaller diamonds within the “waves” as well. Then I did some free-motion quilting in the sashing, which I’m really quite proud of.

I did the same kind of binding on this quilt, and also bound it in a pezzy print, though this one was navy, to complement the blues of the quilt.

Not bad for a break that only started on December 23rd!

Linking up to TGIFF!

Baby K’s Quilt: Finished!

Last … July? I started a quilt for my neighbors, who were having a baby in late August. I chose Baby K’s Quilt, by Audrey of HotPinkQuilts, which she featured during the her spot on the Lets Get Aquainted blog hop organized by Beth of Plum and June. I had high hopes of finishing it and giving it to them as a baby shower present. Then the semester began, and all my best intentions, well, we know what happens to good intentions.

Well, I finished it just before Christmas. Finally! This is what it looks like:

I used scraps for nearly all of the postage stamp squares, though I fussy-cut some 1001 Peeps and the little blue pigs. The green is Kona Clover, the stripe is Hello Pilgrim.

I’m really pleased with how the postage stamp squares turned out:

I free-motion quilted the squares using Elizabeth Hartman’s orange peel pattern. My peels aren’t quite as plump and pretty as hers, but I’m not unhappy with them.

I quilted the borders on each side of the seam, which was, well, not quite as much fun as the orange peels, but I’m happier with how it turned out — though I need to learn how to adjust my stitch length better next time.

I waffled on the backing for a little while, and finally settled on fleece: I talked to friends this summer who had a little one, and their favorite part of the quilt their mother had made was the soft fuzzy backing. As a bonus, it shows the quilting well:

So that’s one of the things I started last summer and finished in December!

Linking up with Thank Goodness It’s FINISHED Friday. Because, really? I’m so glad this one is done.

2012 Year in Review

1. FinalWhole, 2. FQ-Close, 3. Front_garden, 4. Full_front, 5. BlueBlack-staggered, 6. Henrietta1, 7. Notebooks, 8. Sarah’s potholders (front), 9. Black bag 1

In 2012 I started quilting seriously, started blogging, met a whole bunch of really lovely people and learned tons from advice and tutorials and quilt-alongs, and finished a lot of small projects and several quilts, including one that isn’t featured in this mosaic.

In 2013, I’ll be joining the Inspire circle of do. Good Stitches (which I’m really looking forward to) and trying my best to keep up with the Pile O’Fabric Skill Builder Block of the Month in hopes of learning how to sew curves at the very least. And ideally, I’ll be a little bit better at keeping up with this blog during the spring semester than I was this fall.

Baby K’s Quilt (& WIP Wednesday)

First off, I find it hilarious that Audrey, of Hot Pink Quilts called this quilt Baby K’s Quilt, because the baby I’m making for it? His last name starts with a K! It fits perfectly!

Part of the challenge for me on this one was to work entirely from stash: I’ve got a lot of fabric, and I really need to use it! And as much as shopping for more fabric is fun, I really can’t justify it right now, with the volume of stuff I already have.

Luckily, I was able to cut nearly all of the little squares of it from scrap!

The only ones that didn’t come from scrap are the little black and white Daiwabo elephants, the blue pigs and the 1001 Peeps fussy-cut people and horses. Everything else was leftover from previous projects — and I’ve been cutting scraps into 2.5″ squares for a little while now, which was a big help.

The borders were a quandary. I have a lot of black and a lot of white, but neither of those says “baby” to me — particularly not white, since, oops, stains! I had a yard of Kona Kelly green that had no particular intended use, and two half-yard cuts of the green stripe from Hello Pilgrim, which (when I stood back and looked at my stash for a moment) started hollering “baby quilt!” at me. I think the two of them together should work nicely!

There was one oops: I cut three strips of the Hello Pilgrim stripe before I remembered that I wanted the stripes to go lengthwise, not width-wise. Ooops. Now I have a few strips of 3.5″ wide green stripes. I’m sure I’ll find a use for it eventually.

That reminded me that I’m not certain how I’m going to make sure that the stripes in the pinwheels line up properly with the stripes in the borders (problem with a directional patterned fabric!) but I suppose I have time to fiddle with that. And if it’s not perfect, it’s not perfect.

I’m going to use a half-yard cut of an adorable Japanese train-line print for the back. Zoom in on the picture above and see what the various stops are called: I love it. I think it’s the perfect print for a NYC baby.

I was worried that I would find piecing the little squares together too tedious, but it turns out I really enjoy it! Neither of the two blocks I’ve finished so far are perfect, but they’re still really cute, if I do say so myself.

I’m really looking forward to getting to work on this more! It’s been loads of fun so far. I’m going to free-motion quilt the little blocks with Elizabeth Hartmann’s Orange Peel pattern, but I haven’t decided what to do about the borders just yet.

As for other projects, I’ve completed my second June and July blocks for the HST Block of the Month Quilt Along, and one August block. I pieced them all on the Singer 66, and one of them came out a little too small, but I can live with that.

The Mabel messenger bag hasn’t really shifted much: I need to fuse the pieces with interfacing, now that it’s arrived in the mail, and start putting it all together. Simple Math has gotten a few more blocks trimmed, but that’s really quite tedious, so they’re not all done yet.

Knitting-wise, I finished one pair of socks, and started another. I’ve still got a pair hanging out on the needles waiting for the cuffs to be finished, which might turn into a TV project, and my enormous baby-blanket-log-cabin project, for which I have to do only two more sections, but of course they’re the largest ones.

Spinning-wise, I’m spinning up a merino/yak blend by Spunky Eclectic in a green-and-brown colorway called Walden’s woods, and I was making really good progress on it during the Olympics — now that I have fewer excuses to sit down in front of the TV, it’s going more slowly.

Tobin’s Mixtape: Finished!

My new free-motion quilting foot arrived in the mail last week, all metal and (so far) much sturdier. I had Friday off, and took advantage of the time to organize my fabric stash and finish up my Mixtape Quilt, from Elizabeth Hartman’s pattern. I made the “Favorite Songs” style, in its largest size: the lap-quilt of 8″ blocks, which ended up 62″/62″. All posts about it can be seen by clicking the “mixtape quilt” tag on the right sidebar.

I had already quilted about half of it (before my previous free-motion foot broke) and started on it with the previously quilted sides neatly rolled and folded to keep them out of my way. I did my best to keep it all in neat place so that it was smaller, which did make it a little easier to move around, though it was surprisingly heavy.

But by about halfway through today’s quilting, I had given up on keeping the outer edges folded, and only rolled the edge that was under the sewing machine’s arm. I got a little bit better at manipulating the quilt as I went along, and at figuring out where to place my hands while I was moving it — left hand to the back and left of the needle, right hand right and slightly to the front (that is, closer to me), moving in tandem. I think the quilting of it improved a bit by the end. Overall, I’m very proud of it: it’s the first thing I’ve ever free-motion quilted, and it’s the largest quilt I’ve made so far, at 62″x62″. It could be a bit awkward to do something larger than this, because it got difficult to manipulate too closely with half the quilt folded up under the arm of the machine.

Once I’d quilted all of it and trimmed the borders, I machine bound it in one of the fabrics I used in the quilt. It’s a slightly heavier weight than some of the other fabrics, which may stand up to wear and tear a little bit better than a lighter fabric. Since this quilt is going to a 3-year-old boy, durability is definitely a concern.

Once I’d finished it, I tried to take a picture indoors. That was … not entirely successful: I had to hang it up over the railing and take a picture from the stairs. It ended up being a bit of an odd angle:

Thankfully, it was beautiful outside, so I took it out to the back yard, and hung it from the back porch:

It may be feverishly hot outside today, but it made for nice picture-taking.

I’m so pleased to have finished this project, and I can’t wait to see the look on my friend’s face when I give it to her and her son.

Finished quilt!

It’s finished! I’m really very proud of it. And I still love the back, the way the four nine-patch panels sort of hover:

I quilted it along the seams, and it doesn’t show up much on the front, but I like the grid it creates on the back: (ignore the fact that I didn’t brush off all the thread scraps, please!)

I’m really pleased with the way the corners came out. This is the top side:

And this (blurry) picture is the back of the quilt, and you can sort of see the way the binding folds over, and 1/4″ inside that (give or take) there’s a line of stitching from where it’s sewn down on the front of the quilt. I kind of like the look of it.

So that’s the quilt I’m considering as my first quilt, since it’s the first time I’ve followed a pattern or really known what I was doing. :)

Now I just need to figure out what to do with it…