The Sewing Mom

I did it! I finished the baby quilt! I am so thrilled and I had to put to use some new skills to complete this quilt all by myself, but I did it and am very proud of myself!

There are a few things I did for the very first time in making this quilt. After piecing the top together, I had to figure out how to quilt it. I’ve quilted smaller projects, but nothing of this size.

I began by machine stitching in the ditch around all the small squares and then outlined the larger center squares. I did some free motion machine quilting around the characters and words. When it came to the borders though, I felt they needed something more than straight lines. So, while at the fabric store, I found a heart template and decided to go for it. I marked the borders with a water soluble marker and then began stitching.

I completed the bottom border first, but not without doing some major damage to my hand. I do not have a quilting machine, and trying to get all that fabric and batting through the machine everytime I had to turn the quilt to go another direction left my hands bleeding from catching on all the pins that were holding the quilt layers together.

After discussing it with my sister Grace, and then my mom, I pulled out my sewing machine manual and finally figured out a way to drop the feed dogs on the machine and, using my embroidery foot (I don’t have a quilting foot), I was able to glide the layers through, changing direction without having to turn the fabric. It was amazing! I can’t believe I did it!

Finally, after quilting the remaining borders, I seamed my binding together and machine stitched it to the front of the quilt. Now, anyone who knows me knows that I despise hand stitching. So, needless to say, I procrastinated for several days before working up the courage to sit down with needle and thread and hand stitch the binding to the back of the quilt.

It took me 2 days just to complete the binding, but I finally did it. The binding is on and the quilt is complete! I am so very happy with the results and am truly considering purchasing more of the same fabric to make a second one. I need to for gifts and I really do like the way it turned out. What do you think?