Covered in Threadmalaka’s adventure in sewing

Oh my goodness, I’m finally done with it.  I started a quilt for my nephew on Thanksgiving, and here we are, only a few days from Christmas.   That wouldn’t sound like very long, except this is a tiny quilt! It comes out at about 32×32… I should have been able to finish it quicker, but I honestly put it down for 3 weeks and didn’t touch it!!

After piecing this guy, I thought I hated quilting.  Honestly, I think I just bit off more than I can chew.  I wanted to make my nephew a baby quilt, but not a traditional pastel baby blanket.  So I used American Jane’s Recess charm pack.

It has bright colors and is totally retro, which I love.   I also love using charm packs, and this time I also used a quilt pattern for the first time.

The pattern is by Schnibbles, called Come out and Play.  I looked over it over and thought.. how hard could this be?  It’s small, it uses charm packs, and the instructions are right here for me.   I knew there would be a lot of cutting/piecing, but I asked my sister Elizabeth and my mom to help me when they were here for Thanksgiving.

Relunctantly, they helped ;)  Both of them hate quilting, and this one just concreted that thought in their head.  The whole time I was thinking ‘omg this is so fun!’ but they were thinking ‘omg, I want this to be DONE so I never have to quilt again!’

What I didn’t realize at first is that because the stars are not each their own block, I wouldn’t be able to piece this one like I’m used to.  Instead of piecing blocks, then rows.. I had to piece rows only.   After fixing it a bazillion times, my stars are still massively wonky.  In fact, I think I’m going to change the name of this one to ‘wonky stars quilt.’

I thought, this being my 4th quilt, that it would be my best yet.  It’s not my best yet, by any means! I’m sad that none of my stars look like stars.   I do like the way it looks from afar, without a quilting eye

And then there’s the quilting part.  This is what took me so long to finish.  It was going to be my first free-motion quilting project.  I was scared, but I was going to do it anyway - and I did.  Then I looked at my free motion stitches and they were terrible.  Now, before you start thinkng I’m too critical of myself, when I’m quilting I let a lot of messy stuff slide.  I know that most of the time the details get lost in the beauty of the finished piece.  But this was BAD, I had to remove them.

So I sat on the sofa for 4 hours, removing all my free motion stiches.  It was painful.  I put the quilt down and didn’t pick up for 3 weeks.  The only reason I did, in fact, pick it back up last night, is that I am going to see my nephew in 2 days and HAD to get it finished.

I decided I was going to re-do the free-motion quilting, but I would go slow and steady.  I set it all up, got ready, and went to town.  I was stitching evenly and slow and I felt good about it.  Then I caught a glimpse of the back, and the damn tension was messed up so I had huge loops everywhere! Ugh!  Luckily this meant that the stitching was loose, and easy to rip out.  I had only done about a quarter of the quilt, so it wasn’t too bad to remove this time.

I couldn’t do it again.  I removed the quilting foot and put back on the old trusty walking foot and stitched in the ditch a bit and called it quits.

Here’s the back:

Hard to see, but I have squiggly line around the whole thing, then I just quilted boxes around the inside.  Good enough.

What I learned:

• I’m not ready for this kind of quilting, I need to keep with big blocks until I really understand everything that I’m doing.
• Quilt patterns are FUN and make life a lot easier.
• I need to practice free-motion quilting, a lot.