A quilt for baby-squirrel

This is another seriously overdue blog post, as I made this quilt about 9 months ago, eek! Time flies when you're being slack.

This quilt was a gift that I made for Sarah and her newest bub.

While that seems nice and selfless, I was a great excuse for me to use the woodland animal (plus blue giraffe??) fabric I have used as a feature, which has been in my stash for aages. I had seen the fabric at a quilt show and couldn't resist buying it because it's so cute, even though I had no plans for it whatsoever (unusal for me).

I then selected other fabrics from my stash that coordinated with the animals for the rest of the quilt top. To finish off the quilt I bought coordinating backing and binding.

To design the quilt I sketched up the design on squared paper, carefully mazximising the use of the woodland fabric, and also the solid orange I'd decided to use, which with some very careful cutting I used almost every scrap of (hence needing to buy different fabric for binding).

I also used this quilt as a way to have a bit of a practice with free motion quilting before embarking on a bigger (also as yet unblogged) project, just to make sure my free motion skills weren't completely rusty.



And I'll leave you with some lovely pics of the tiny recipient on the quilt (she's not this tiny anymore!)...

A quilt for baby Riley

I recently made a quilt for my good friend Simon and his 1 year old son Riley.

The criteria for selecting the fabrics and design were that the quilt needed to:
a) feature blue heavily
b) be awesome

So, with some help from the boy, I selected the above bundle of fabrics at GJs. After some playing around we settled on this fairly simple design, in order to let the fabrics shine:

And then, guess what, one of the fabrics does shine! ...well glow... it turns out the Star Wars fabric is glow in the dark!

  

If I hadn't been pressing it in the evening and then turned the lights off we might not have found out; so check your stash for any secretly glow in the dark fabric guys!

It turned out that one of the fabrics I picked was designed by "Riley Blake", so I had a nice convenient name tag on the selvedge of that fabric!

 

I did different quilting in each of the sections, including loop-de-loops in the red section to mirror the print.

And after binding in red... a fantastic new quilt!!

 

Here it is with a happy dad after being gifted:

And doesn't Riley look cosy sleeping underneath it...

And it's plenty big enough for him to grow into...

Yay for a successful quilt!

A Quilt for Baby Kyle

Well done to those that correctly guessed the location for the pictures of Oscars quilt in that post; those photos, and these ones were taken at the amazing Chatsworth House (which was used as Pemberly in the 2005 Pride and Prejudice).

Today I get to share some more pictures of the beautiful house and gardens under the guise of showing you another baby quilt; this one was a gift for baby Kyle. I really hope that Kyle uses and loves this quilt as much as his big sister does her quilt.

I absolutely love the fabrics I used, a combination of ants and woodpeckers, and some 'filler' fabrics (mostly variations on spots and stripes, as that's my MO, fabrics shown here). I showed you this quilt top last September, but only quilted it more recently. I made a basic design where I cut each fabric into two strips and one square, and pieced the square into a random spot cut in the strips.

The back is a blue version of the grey ant fabric on the front of the quilt. To keep the simplicity, I then quilted the quilt with straight lines about 1/4 inch away from each of the seam lines. Lastly, the quilt was bound with a darker grey to frame the quilt.

   

A Quilt for Baby Oscar

Now I'm back from my holiday (which was awesome by the way!) normal blog posting shall resume. First up are a few quilts that I made and took with me as gifts for a few special people. The first one I want to share is a baby quilt made for the new son of my dear friend Helen.

When hanging out with slightly pregnant Helen when I was in the UK a year ago, I asked her if she'd like/use a baby quilt, and following a very positive response to that question I delved a little deeper and established that she: a) doesn't like muted colours, instead preferring bright colours and b) likes elephants.

Very frustratingly, when I was shopping for fabrics for this quilt there were no fabrics with elephants that I liked. So plan B was to make my own elephant!

Big props must go to Darren (aka "The Boy") for sharing his photoshop skills in helping me with the elephant outline, as I had a photo of an elephant I'd previously embroidered that I wanted to use, but didn't have a front on picture, so it required some minor manipulation.

The main background of the quilt top is a (really quite big) disappearing-nine-patch, which was a super quick and easy design to do! It only took me a couple of hours to cut out, stitch up, cut up, and stitch up the whole of the quilt-top excluding the appliqué. The elephant was then appliquéd on with a zig-zag stitched, and the top free-motion quilted with a big stipple design (which I'm still practising getting a good 'big' stipple).

I'm madly in love with the fabric I got for the back of the quilt - SUPERHEROES!!! How amazing is the fabric!!

And look, I've already been provided with proof that it's already had some nap-time action. Hopefully it'll get plenty more use as Oscar grows up.

Bonus points if you have recognised the incredibly picturesque backdrop where these pictures were taken. 

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!