Welcome to my blog!
Last Christmas I found a fun blog hop where folks shared a Christmas project and a cookie recipe. Yum! We ended up making 8 different kinds of cookies for the holidays and I enjoyed the projects everyone shared. Carol announced the Put a Little Love in Your Quilt Blog Hop and I signed up to share. Her requirements were just that we include a heart somewhere in the project... This is absolutely the fastest I have ever finished a quilt! I started January 8 and finished February 6. Click on the images to see the details!
My adult ed class teacher challenged us to make a double 4-patch quilt using different fabric for most of the design. (If we had done this it would have been 30 different fabrics. She has a huge stash of neat, new fabric so it's easy for her.) Anyway, I decided to use any heart fabrics I had in my (older, mostly inherited) stash and to make the pattern with that.
Here is my quilt, semi-artfully displayed on a chair in our backyard.....!
There are some memories sewn into this quilt.
The white fabric with the large black polka dots (starts at the center and goes up to the right) were from a selection of fabrics I got when our (now almost 30 year old) son was an infant. Like all new mothers, I had read how exposing the kiddos to high contrast helped developed their abilities. Our baby ended up with a white paper plate with a black felt pen happy face in the side of his crib (as I got real since I really didn't have any idea how to sew a quilt and it was more fun to hold him anyway!)
The fabric with hearts and words (larger pieces start at the second row and goes down ending with the white heart, this fabric was also used in the smaller 4-patches) is a piece of fabric I got from my Aunt June - probably more than 15 years ago. It was a design printed on the fabric to cut and make a sort of collar deal. 
In the bottom row is my first paper pieced attempt at a heart. I was going to make my mom a jacket, but I could only share the sewn together pieces with her. She felt the seams and appreciated the effort. She was impressed even though she couldn't see very well. That red in that heart was in the first set of fabric I ever bought to make a quilt.
Here is how I went about making the quilt:
First I went thru my fabric to pick the colors and patterns...
At first I was going to only use reds and pinks....
I started cutting to get a better idea of how things would look. I was thinking of adding more colors. Green and lilac were considered, but black and white became more appealing...
I started with the larger pieces and arranged them on the design wall. I decided to not use all the flower prints and instead went for more graphic fabrics.
I folded and pinned together the narrower stripes to audition how things could look...
Then I made the smaller 4-patches and added them to the design wall...
The piecing of the double 4-patch was challenging. There were going to be many seams to match so I measured and trimmed if needed each time I got to a square!
The measuring helped. I think all but one of the intersections is pretty perfect. I was consistent with how I placed the fabrics when piecing and pressing the 4-patches, but when I put them next to the other blocks they got twisted so the ironing on the back is not consistent....
Ready now for the back. I have not used fleece before so this seemed a good time to try it out! My friend found 50" * 60" throws at CVS (3 for $10) and gave me one to use for my backing.
I took a photo of the front, printed it and doodled to decide how to quilt the project... (It turned out later that everyone in class did stitch in the ditch in a grid around the larger squares and called it done. But that quilting was right for their beautiful modern fabric and colored projects.) I added a half row of blocks to the top to not waste the fleece, and added an additional line of quilting going from top to the right intersecting between the two smaller loops when I found that the batting required closer quilting...
I thought this was going to be really difficult to quilt, but I just spray basted it to some polyester batting and used the walking foot (learning about using the walking foot this year with Leah Day). The fleece turned out to be easy to quilt. I started and ended the quilting in the batting before I got to the top so didn't have many thread tie offs at all! I really like the way the design makes the quilt a little puffy! Click any of the photos to see the quilting!
- Minute 0:56 see how she preps the start of the joining part of the binding
- Start sewing it on on the bottom middle to distract the eye
- Minute 4 Mark end of corner, learn foot measurement to help,
- Minute 5:23 stop then pinch the fabric at the end of the corner and bring up to the side just stitched.
- Minute 6:10 use padded nail file or folded fabric to help placement of presser foot
- Minute 8:08 how to end with her folded method of ending the binding
It ended up, I sort of did my cutting the way she describes here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXvLAHWbyXo except I did more work and cut my fabric into fat quarters first as I didn't notice the video until typing this! I tried making continuous bias strips but lost a portion of the fabric as the way I marked the lines was difficult to see and my cutting went wonky. In my next tries, I did not depend on the angles in the cut fabric to make the seams. Instead I used a ruler to verify that the intersection was at 90 degrees, put a pin in, drew a line and added more pins. I chain pieced. With this extra effort all the binding fabric strips were usable and straight.
Our son helped me by taking the photos of the finished quilt, and tested the size by sitting with it on a chair. Little Buffy and he approve, but we decided the quilt will be saved to give as a gift later on. You can really see the quilting in this photo...
Please click on the names of the blogs below to visit the other lovely heart projects shared for the event and leave a happy comment!
February 7
QuiltQuest <-- You are here!
Come back tomorrow to see the last group of bloggers.
And if you missed the first two days.
February 5
