To rest and recuperate I had a week of annual leave in July. We spent the first half of the week helping my brother out with some DIY, he's helped me a lot lately, so I felt good returning the favour. Back home again and the plan was to go walking the rest of the week. However, this is the weather we woke up to.
Nothing else for it - I decided to stay in and sew. With two looming deadlines- a new baby neice or nephew due at the end of August, and a special birthday for my Mum in September, I needed to get on with the gift-making.
The baby quilt was the first to be tackled. I am doing my best to use up stash fabric, and had some lovely soft flannel waiting for a project. This pattern by Shannon Fabrics has been on my wish list for a while, but it has been surprisingly difficult to find exactly three prints that go together to make it. Frustratingly, fabrics seem to fall naturally into pairs or groups of four, but not threes. The three patterned fabrics are from the Michael Miller Nature Babies range and the orange spots which I've used for sashing are F3665 from Scenic Route by Riley Blake. Although both are quilting flannel, and are similar enough to allow them to be sewn together easily, the Michael Miller fabric feels thicker and firmer, while the Riley Blake fabric still has a little bit of stretch even after pre-washing.
Full of enthusiasm I started cutting late at night despite being tired...This was the first mistake. The pattern is designed for minkee cuddle fabric, and has half inch seams. I was using flannel with quarter inch seams. All my pieces were too big. I decided to drink some tea and ponder whether to cut half an inch off each side or find some other bodge to make it all fit.
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| Michael Miller Nature Babies |
The solution I chose in the end was to cut the orange sashing in half lengthways and trim a quarter of an inch off each long piece. I now have a whole lot of orange strip scraps, but I am happy with how this quilt has turned out, and think the proportion of the blocks might even look better with a bit less orange. I left the sashing between blocks the original width.
The next mistake might be obvious to those people with a better sense of size and scale than me. This photo shows the quilt blocks laid out across the foot of my king sized bed. It was only now, after I had added the sashing between blocks and laid out the two halves of the quilt that I spotted the problem.
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| It's a cuddle jungle out there |
This lovely soft snuggly flannel quilt was intended for a new born baby. It measures approximately five foot by three foot, which is way, way bigger than a cot.
I do really like the layout of this pattern, and I did consider just carrying on and finishing the quilt as it was. However, I think that the fabrics are just too babyish for a quilt that size. By the time the baby is big enough to have a quilt this big, he or she will be too old to like it.
I decided to treat this second mistake as a bonus, and make two half sized quilts from the blocks. The easiest way to do this would have been just to split the quilt down the middle as it is in the photo above. However, this has all the directional prints facing the same way, which would be sideways across the quilts. This jarred with me, so I unpicked all the sashing between blocks, and shuffled them around until I got a new layout which I liked, with the directional prints all facing different ways.
For backing I just used a big piece of the blue animal print. I decided for the quilting to practice some more free motion. Since I am still very much a learner, I chose to do an irregular loop de loop pattern. I feel that the it looks a bit (a lot) like childish scribbles, which tie in with the baby-themed fabrics. I used variegated orange Silk finish cotton by Mettler, simply because it was on offer at a local shop. I won't use this thread again. I loved the colour, but I had quite a few problems with the tread snapping. This might be due to my poor free-motion technique though.
The wadding was a 100% cotton from the sewing shop in Machynlleth. It is quite heavy and released a huuuuge amount of fluff as I was quilting it. I had to clean the bobbin race out about four or five times as it got so clogged with fluff! I didn't take any photos of my quilting before I washed it, and it has gone very, very crinkly after a short 40C wash. The crinkling is all attributable to the wadding since I had prewashed the flannel fabrics before use. Some people don't like this look, but I'm happy that any sewing wobbles get hidden in all those crinkles.
