A Quilt for Ginger

Today I have little story of secrecy and subterfuge, involving 5 sewcialists and a baby quilt.

Once upon a time there was a young lady called Kat, who is currently excitedly expecting her first child, a baby boy, currently nicknamed 'Ginger'. Kat is friends with a group of lovely young ladies that all go to Social Sewing together; Melanie, Sarah, Belinda and Rachel (me).

One day, on the twitters, Kat makes a cheeky request for Rachel to make Ginger a quilt. Rachel responds that she'd be happy to make a quilt with Kat, and Melanie and Belinda pipe up that they'd like to have a go at quilting too.

Following this conversation, the girls, excluding Kat, decide to band together and make a quilt for Ginger as a surprise for Kat. Emails were exchanged, plans were made and a fat quarter bundle of 'Out To Sea' fabric was ordered:

The four ladies met up on a (very hot) public holiday for a day of quilt sewing (and eating delicious noms provided by Melanie's beau, see evidence below):

The BBC Pride and Prejudice (1995) was put on in the background, and they discussed different options for the quilt layout, settling on a 5" base 'unit' and creation of various blocks sized for that unit. After making up a few blocks extra pieces of fabric were cut to fill in the gaps:

And the quilt top was stitched together,

basted,

quilted and bound.

Then, on Saturday Kat had a baby shower, and the surprise was revealed:

     

And we hope that she loves it! (Sadly Melanie couldn't be there for the gifting as she had a lovely weekend away already booked in, so sadly isn't in the picture below).

The End.

Congratulations and Best Wishes Kat! I'm so incredibly excited for you, and wish you, Ben and Ginger all the best xxx

Some more information about the quilt...

We quilted the quilt 1/4" away from some of the seams, making sure the quilting was at minimum 8-10" apart as specified by the batting. The batting was the polyester batting from GJs (I'm pretty sure, it was some I had stashed away in my wardrobe)

As the map panel was larger than 10", I did some hand quilting in a matching blue around the continents:

And in the large navy square added a couple of lines of 'waves':

Belle embroidered us up a fantastic little label for the back of the quilt:

But didn't quite finish stitching it on in the car ride to Kat's house, so finished it off after the gift had been opened ;)

Above you can see the backing was a fantastically coordinating navy nautical style print that Sarah spotted in Rathdowne Fabrics.

The quilt took us about a day to finish, excluding the label and hand quilting. Everything else was done by machine, including stitching on the binding. At some points it was much quicker having 4 of us working on it, (with 2 cutting and 2 piecing when constructing the blocks) but at other times only one person was working on it at a time (eg quilting and binding).

We all felt a little guilty getting together and specifically not inviting Kat along, but hopefully the outcome was worth it!