A baby quilt

I bought a stack of six fat quarters at the quilt show this year because just looking at them reminded me of my cousin who, lucky for me, is having a baby girl soon. Of course I had to make a crazy quilt! In case you are wondering I was worried it was a little bit loud for a baby, but rest assured my cousin loved it!

The two fabrics that really drew me in were the glasses and purses you can see above. The sashing is a hot pink cross hatch print that I picked up in another booth, but it matched perfectly.

Check out the back fabric!!!How cute is that? I love the back as much as the front.

You can kind of see here I made a 5 inch diagonal grid to follow to quilt it. It looked pretty good I think. The binding I machine sewed since I figured it may get quite a lot of washings. The binding was a trip to Joann, but I was amazed with the softness of the fabric. It was unexpected coming from there.

I had some scraps left and couldn't resist making a few burp cloths.

This one is my favorite. I used some vintage lace from an estate sale on all of these.They turned out so cute.

The grey and pink was pieced together in stripes with ruffles made of lace and the bird one next to it just has lace down each side of the featured fabric. I had to fussy cut the good birds. Some days you just have to fussy cut the birds, you know?

Flowering roses quilt: Part 3

It's another English Roses quilt. I don't know what to say. I made it for my sister in law after she found out the original was for her and she had been sabotaged by her own brother. We went to the quilt shop and she picked out the fabrics. While they are very pretty, they just aren't to my taste. That's a good thing. It may be the only way to ensure I don't gift another quilt to myself!

There's not much to say about this one. It went together well.

I love the type on this print.

I washed and dried it twice already to give it a head start to getting fuzzy flower edges.

I used voile on the back and it didn't seem to baste well even though I was pretty thorough. This was before my glue discovery. You should see the one I am working on now. It is flawless because of the glue!

Again, I machine stitched the binding. I am liking this technique more. I know she has three dogs, so I imagine it will get washed quite a bit. With the voile back I wanted to make it a bit stronger. That's all folks!

Table runner experiments

I made a Christmas table runner with some left over charm squares and scraps I had and it is pretty darn cute. There was no pattern, but if anyone wants what I did, let me know.

So there were two things I experimented with on this.

1. Elmer's Glue Basting - seriously, this has blown my mind. You can follow the link to the full tutorial, but basically you use glue instead of safety pins to baste you quilt front, batting and quilt back, then let it dry over night. The next morning you can quilt it all together right through the glue. The reason I made the table runner is my next quilt project is a baby quilt, and I was worried the quilt would be crunchy because of glue. When it was complete I washed it on warm and all the glue was gone. It is as soft as any of my other quilts, but didn't involve taping it to my floor and a million safety pins. I want to glue all my fabrics together now. Oh! And I was able to sew through the glue, even when it was thick, just fine. Mind. Blown.

2. I sewed the binding using my machine. I followed this tutorial. I love how a hand sewn binding looks, but I was worried with a baby quilt I needed to do something a bit sturdier. I am glad I did this project first because now my next project will look nicer. Overall it was easy and way faster. I still prefer the look of hand binding, but for something that may get a lot of use I may start doing machine binding more.

So I tried a couple new techniques, used some scraps, invented a pattern and have a great thick table runner I feel comfortable placing hot dishes on. What a winner of a project! I needed that.