Meet Walter!

This is what giving up looks like...

I've tried on two separate occasions to free motion quilt this little baby quilt and both times, I ran into trouble. Whenever I try to curve the stitching, the tip of my needle catches in the fabric. Even though I'm using the same machine, and foot, and thread, and batting, and bobbins, I've used successfully a hundred or more other times, it won't work.

The quilt top has already been sitting since January of 2016 and I don't have any idea when I'll be able to free motion quilt again. (At this point I'm violently resisting the idea of taking my machine to the dealer since it hasn't been long at all since its last cleaning/checkup and on previous occasions its come home unable to do free motion quilting. Too much time and money risked for something that's not guaranteed to work.)

So I pulled out my walking foot and now the quilt is done. I'd rather that the quilting was a pretty meander, but it's not going to stay at my house and quilting with the walking foot is a completely acceptable way to finish it. So is machine stitching the binding.

I'm hoping now that this one is done I can tackle the free motion quilting drama with fresh eyes. Whatever happens with that, it feels good to have my first baby quilt finish in almost a year.

I love the top and backing. It's Bonnie Hunter's Lozenges, in the size that she intended for them to be. For the lozenge quilt I'm keeping, I'm making them much smaller. This one was fun to put together, but I think I'll be happier long term with the smaller pieces.

River {a baby quilt tutorial}

This isn't the style of baby quilt I usually make, but I was looking at all of the blue fabric I got from that Craigslist ad and wondering what I could make with cuts from just that stack and an idea started to form. This little quilt would be perfect if you want to whip something up without digging through your entire stash or if you're working with someone else's coordinated leftovers. 

Start with sixteen 2 1/2" WOF strips. For each block, you'll use two 10" strips each of two different colors. (I cut each strip in half before matching them up so  that each block would be different instead of making them in pairs.)  Sew four alternating strips together to make a block like this one.

Cut the block into four 2 1/2" strips and rearrange them to form a sixteen patch block.

Make sixteen blocks and assemble into four rows of four. Did I mention that this quilt was quick?

Quilt and bind. As always, if you make this quilt I'd love for you to send me a picture or link up to my weekly Let's Make Baby Quilts! linky party. There's a list of my free baby quilt tutorials over in the sidebar and you  can find out when new ones are added by either following my blog or liking the Let's Make Baby Quilts Facebook page.

Meet Johnny!

As the thrift store scrap bags get more and more picked over, I've been telling myself that I could work my way through Bonnie Hunter's books, make a zillion fun little quilts, and probably not make much of a dent. 

Green fabric, I've got. I used a bunch of it  for Quinn's Trip Around the World, but there's still plenty left. Not that I'm trying to use it up. I like green fabric. Red, I've got. I'm hoarding every shade I can find in my stash for a couple of different projects, but I made myself part with just enough for this quilt.

The pattern is Criss Cross Applesauce, from Scraps & Shirttails II.(The book is obscenely overpriced on Amazon right now, but Bonnie is still selling it.)  I wasn't sure at first if I was making a baby quilt or a big person quilt, but after twenty-five blocks I decided that I was done. It's a fun pattern and I may try it again in different colors, but for now this is good.

While I was working on the quilt, Hubby decided that our youngest two kids might not know the story of Johnny Appleseed, so we found and watched the Disney version on youtube (voiced by Dennis Day from the old Jack Benny radio show), and got into a debate about whether it was Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill who rode a tornado. When did they become "fakelore" instead of tall tales?

This post is linked to Needle and Thread Thursday, Finish it up Friday

Meet Karen!

The lighting isn't great this morning and I can't get my pretty quilted swirls to show up, but you get the idea -- 

This is the Boho Patchwork Vintage Star Quilt from Sweet Dreams By Sarah, using 4" squares instead of the layer cake pieces that the pattern calls for. It wasn't much work to adjust the rest of the math and make it baby quilt sized. I haven't taken a tape measure to it yet, but it's around 40" square.

The fabric is from a thrift store (or it might have been a yard sale) scrap bag. Because these were strips left over from someone else's project, they were already together and coordinated, just waiting for someone to make something else. And now that I know that I like the way they look, I'm going to use the rest for something a bit more ambitious.

For more finishes, check out  Finish it Up Friday, Can I get a Whoop Whoop?, and Freedom Fridays.

Meet Jed!

The more baby quilts I make, the pickier I get about my backing choices. I don't need everything to be all matchy-matchy, but I'd like the combination to make some sort of sense. When baby quilts are in use, you're just as likely to see the back as the front.

I'll let the new mom who winds up with this quilt figure out which is which. The postage stamp side was definitely more work, but the puppy on the other side (Gingham Dog, a free pattern from Moda Lissa's blog) is awfully cute.

All of the 2 1/2" squares I used were extra from cutting out my Drab Postage Stamp quilt, so putting this together wasn't much work at all.

Meet Katy!

I don't throw away fabric. Actually I do, sometimes, but it's a rare thing unless the fabric is seriously nasty or damaged beyond use. A few dots of ink or glittery fingernail polish? I can and will cut around that! 

This piece has been knocking around the sewing room for a few years now. Must've come in one of the thrift store bags because I wouldn't have bought it, not even at super low clearance prices. It's not THAT ugly, but it wasn't going to make the kind of quilts I want to make. 

So I separated the squares, which of course weren't printed exactly on the grain. They did measure just a hair over two inches, so that part worked out okay. 

And then I pieced them together into the kind of quilt that I did want to make. Ridiculous and tedious and I'm not sure I'd do it again anytime soon, but it was a fun little challenge.

I bound the edges with what was left of the fabric and backed it with the same little dots I used for Ansel.

For more finishes, check out  Sew Much Ado, Finish it Up Friday, Can I get a Whoop Whoop?,  , and Freedom Fridays, Wonderful at Home, and Inspired Friday.

Meet Gordon!

This baby quilt started out as an unfinished quilt from a yard sale, the same one where I bought the quilt we haul down to the river and spread on the rocks. The frog print was really cute and it was only a quarter and it looked like it would be a great start to a baby quilt... 

I probably should have looked a little closer. Those weren't solid strips of the novelty print. Instead, it was cut into six inch squares and pieced into strips. With a decorative zig zag stitch.

Why would anyone do that?  I wonder if she didn't know the settings on her sewing machine, or if that odd serpentine zig zag was a deliberate choice.

I cut it back into squares and did what I could with the frog print and the navy blue print and the bit of blue sheet that was left over from Teenage Daughter's latest dressmaking project.  It's not what I was picturing in my head, but it'll do.

Meet Ansel!

I wanted to name this quilt after a photographer, and Ansel Adams was the first one to come to mind. Actually, the only other one who came to mind was Matthew Brady, and his subject matter was pretty grim, so Ansel it is!

The pattern is Click! and it's in the August 2013 issue of American Patchwork & Quilting. I bought the magazine because I loved the quilt, then decided that even though I wanted to make it, it probably wasn't a quilt I needed to have in my house forever.

As written, the pattern alternates light and dark cameras. I made all of mine dark and added sashing to separate them. The camera prints are raided from my other projects. The backing is a polka dot print that Mary Ellen sent me earlier this year. All of the grey for the lenses and camera buttons is leftover bits from the backing of Dashes in the Woods, because I never throw good fabric away. It may take a while before I figure out where it belongs, but there's almost always something I can do with it.

For more finishes, check out Sew Much Ado, Finish it Up Friday, Can I get a Whoop Whoop?,  and Freedom Fridays, Wonderful at Home, Make it Monday and Inspired Friday.

Meet Levi!

Most of my baby quilts start with the question "What if?"

This time, I was wondering what would happen if I took that pieced border that I'm loving so much from Jo's Chocolate covered Cherries pattern and made a two color baby quilt. I used 2 1/2" cut squares instead of the 2" squares the pattern calls for and left out the alternate blocks.

I couldn't be happier with the results!

The solid blue is from a sheet that we bought for Teenage Daughter's Halloween costume after she'd stolen one sheet from my stash and decided that one was too purply. This one was almost the right shade....but not as good as another stash sheet that I'd set aside to back her brother's quilt.  The backing is one of the lovely baby prints that Mary Ellen sent me earlier this year.

For more finishes, check out Sew Much Ado, Finish it Up Friday, Can I get a Whoop Whoop?,  and Freedom Fridays, Wonderful at Home, Make it Monday and Inspired Friday.

Meet Roy!

Thanks for all of the great suggestions for cowboy names. I'm going to have to make more quilts just so I can name them Wyatt and Shane and Jebadiah and Matt and Chester.... motivation is in short supply around here these days, so I'll take any I can get! 

Meet Roy...

The pattern is Sadie, without the pieced border this time because I didn't cut enough squares. And it's probably a good thing, because the blue print I used for the backing wouldn't have been big enough if this quilt was another 3" wide. As it was, I wound up taking 1/8" off of one white border to make it work.

For more finishes, check out  Sew Much Ado, Finish it Up Friday, Can I get a Whoop Whoop?,  , and Freedom Fridays, Wonderful at Home, and Inspired Friday.

Meet Glenn!

After Trevor and Jonah, I was hoping I'd have enough blue sheet left over for the background of this quilt. There was plenty, with enough left over to bind something else.

My quick rummage through the sewing room for yellow tone on tone fabrics didn't turn up as many as I wanted, so I used some pieces with the wrong sides facing up to add more variety. Then, as soon as the top was done, I found the rest of those yellows.

The backing is left over from the piece I used for Laura.

The pattern is Buzz. You can find it, and all of the other free Let's Make Baby Quilts! patterns, over on the sidebar. The quilt is on its way to the local birthing center. Are you participating in 100 Quilts for Kids this year? It's a great source of inspiration and motivation.

For more finishes, check out  Sew Much Ado, Finish it Up Friday, Can I get a Whoop Whoop?,  , and Freedom Fridays, Wonderful at Home, and Inspired Friday.

Meet Trevor!

I found one strip of this wonderful animal print in a thrift store scrap bag. The blue and green solids all came from different bags, but they went together so I kitted it all up and waited for inspiration. There was such a limited amount of the animal print and I didn't want any of it to go to waste...

The Flexi Strip Baby Quilt Tutorial from Sew in Peace was exactly the idea I needed. It calls for three strips of the focus fabric, but I worked with what I had, squaring up the animal print and making the rest of the quilt to work around that piece.

For more finishes, check out  Sew Much Ado, Finish it Up Friday, Can I get a Whoop Whoop?,  , and Freedom Fridays, Wonderful at Home, and Inspired Friday.

Meet Tina!

I wanted to make a baby-quilt-sized version of that mug rug I made a few weeks back, the one that was just like  Marilyn but with different color placement. The only thing stopping me was fabric selection. Then Mary Ellen sent me a box of fabric for the baby quilts and in it was the perfect tone-on-tone pink yardage.


So here's Tina! She's backed with a pink stripe and bound with a light pink polka-dot. Just snowball and nine-patch blocks set on point, a couple of hours of piecing and another hour of basting and quilting...but it's cute. I think some mommy at the birthing center will enjoy it.

This post is linked to I Gotta Try That, Sew Much Ado, Finish it Up Friday, Can I get a Whoop Whoop?, Get Crafting Friday, Pinworthy Projects, and Freedom Fridays, Wonderful at Home, and Inspired Friday.

Birds!

The batteries in the good camera go from fine to dead with no warning, so bear with me.  (And don't look at the dates -- the old camera thinks it's 2013.) They're not the best pictures, but at least they'll show what I did.

It started a few years ago with a square of cute fabric with little birds on it. I'd lose the birds if I cut it into squares. There were some other pink fabrics in my thrift store scraps, so I folded them all up in a zip lock and told myself I'd do something with them someday.

"Someday" came on Thursday afternoon. I squared up the bird  fabric and added borders. There's another pink solid that'll work for the binding and I've got more of the pink feathery fabric to go into a pieced back.

It all seemed like it was going to be a quick project, started and finished in the same week. Then I started to think about those borders and all of the tutorials over at The Inbox Jaunt and wonder if I could do something better with this than my usual stipple. So I'm going to fold up the top and think about it for a while.

I'm linking up to Patchwork Times and My Quilt Infatuation.

Marliyn {a baby quilt tutorial}

When I made Marilyn, I was just playing around, trying to make a top that would go with a girly flannel print that was a good size for backing a baby quilt. I didn't know what I was going to come up with, so I didn't take any pictures of the process. You'd think I'd have learned better by now...

As soon as I had the top together and quilted, I knew I'd be making another one so I could take pictures and write up the tutorial.

You'll need:

1 yard each of the background fabric and blue print.

For the setting triangles, cut three 9 3/4" squares and cut them into quarters as shown.

For the corner triangles, cut two 5 1/8" squares and cut each in half as shown. 

Cut five 2 1/2" WOF (width of fabric) strips from the blue print and four 2 1/2" WOF strips from the background fabric. Sew two dark strips and one light strip together (make 2) and two light strips and one dark strip together (make one.) Press open and cut each long strip into 2 1/2" sections. Assemble into nine-patch blocks. (I managed to forget to take a picture of the nine patch blocks -- if you need to see how those should look, check here.)

For the snowball blocks, cut nine 6 1/2" squares from background fabric and thirty-six 2 1/2" squares from the blue print. Place a 2 1/2" print square on each corner of a 6 1/2" background square. Sew diagonally as shown, then press open. To reduce bulk, you can trim off the extra fabric a quarter inch outside the seam line. Make nine blocks.

Lay out blocks and setting triangles on point as shown --

Quilt and bind. As always, if you make this quilt I'd love for you to send me a picture or link up to my weekly Let's Make Baby Quilts! linky party. There's a list of my free baby quilt tutorials over in the sidebar and you  can find out when new ones are added by either following my blog or liking the Let's Make Baby Quilts Facebook page.

Turn a Novelty Print into an Applique Pattern

Got a couple of yards of a cute novelty print that you don't know what do do with?  I usually buy small cuts of fabric to cut into even smaller bits and pieces for the baby quilts, but sometimes I find myself with actual yardage. There were two or three yards of this cute mouse print in one of my Craigslist purchases and I knew that if I cut it into my usual 2 1/2" squares, it'd be in every single quilt I made until the end of time. I needed a different tactic... 

This will work best with a novelty print that has a simple design in just a couple of colors. Pick one element and enlarge it on your copier until you get an image that's large enough and clear enough to trace. I don't have photos of the first copies I made, but they were dark and blurry. Just go around the edges and do the best you can. Leave out some of the detail if necessary. Once you get a traced image that you like,  go ahead and enlarge that to the size you want your finished applique to be. The mouse with cheese is about an inch high on the fabric. My applique is probably six or eight inches high. 

Trace the elements of your applique design onto fusible web. (Remember to reverse the image first!)  I divided the mouse head into three pieces because I wanted to separately outline the face and ears and left several of the holes out of the cheese so it wouldn't be as complex to applique. The nose is a separate piece of black fabric. 

I fused the pieces into place and outlined each one with buttonhole stitch, then embroidered the tail. Once that was done, I squared up the background fabric and added borders.

These are brand new instructions for an old quilt, one that I made before I started doing the baby quilt tutorials.  If I was making this quilt again today, I'd do something else with that wide outer border. The finished quilt was donated to a fund raiser auction at the center where one of my sons gets speech therapy - and  someone did buy it for a reasonable price, so I'm not stressing over it now. 

As always, if you make this quilt I'd love for you to send me a picture or link up to my weekly Let's Make Baby Quilts! linky party. There's a list of my free baby quilt tutorials over in the sidebar and you  can find out when new ones are added by either following my blog or liking the Let's Make Baby Quilts Facebook page.

Meet Garnet!

I made a baby quilt from someone else's pattern this week. Meet Garnet --

The pattern  is Sapphires and Rubies from Needyl. I didn't use her technique for four-at-a-time flying geese and my attempt to recreate the measurements didn't come out quite right, so I've lost the points on my gems and they don't line up the way hers did. I also left of a row of gems to make the quilt a bit smaller. If I make it again, I think I'll follow the directions better. Or make the gems scrappy by piecing them from 2 1/2" squares. Wouldn't that be cute? 

The fabric I used for the brown gems is left over from the backing of the turtle quilt. I thought I had enough to back this quilt too, and I did. If you consider 1/2" extra around each edge to be "enough."  I pinned and quilted very carefully and it worked. 

This post is linked to I Gotta Try That, Sew Much Ado, Finish it Up Friday, Can I get a Whoop Whoop?, Get Crafting Friday, Pinworthy Projects, and Freedom Fridays, Wonderful at Home, and Inspired Friday.

Meet Cookie!

This is the second of the quilts I made so I could try out  free-motion patterns from Beginner's Guide to Free-Motion Quilting by Natalia Bonner.

The quilting design, Double Arcs, is similar to the quilting design I used for Annabelle and Steve.  Instead of following the directions from the book, I followed  the directions for Continuous Curve from 31 Days of Walking Foot Quilting and  made two sets of lines.

And look at my backing!

The date on the selvage is 2000 -- is that before Cookie Monster stopped being Cookie Monster and started singing about healthy foods? 

This post is linked to I Gotta Try That, Sew Much Ado, Finish it Up Friday, Can I get a Whoop Whoop?, Get Crafting Friday, Pinworthy Projects, and Freedom Fridays, Wonderful at Home, and Inspired Friday.

Meet Malia

I whipped up this little quilt because I wanted to try out one of the free-motion patterns from Beginner's Guide to Free-Motion Quilting by Natalia Bonner.

I loved the way the quilting design looked in the book and was considering it for Alex's big girl version of Annabelle, but now that I've given it a try I think it gives the quilt a fluffier texture than I want. It might have laid flatter with cotton batting instead of polyester, and I want to try it on a little wall quilt because I still do like the look.

It was nearly midnight when I got the binding on, so the pictures don't show the texture as well as I'd like. Now I'd better hurry and make more tops because there are a lot more designs in this book I want to try. 

This post is linked to I Gotta Try That, Sew Much Ado, Finish it Up Friday, Can I get a Whoop Whoop?, Get Crafting Friday, Pinworthy Projects, and Freedom Fridays, Wonderful at Home, and Inspired Friday.