Friday, June 15, 2012

Pink Baby


Date:  June 2012

Size:  30 x 30

Reason:  I took some pretty pinks from the blocks my grandma gave me because I knew they would make a cute baby quilt.

Fabrics:  Scraps from my stash, my grandma's blocks and a baby blanket of my daughter's.

Lessons:  My machine quilting is getting better!  Although I'm not doing Leah Day's tutorials per se, most of my quilting information comes from her blog:  http://freemotionquilting.blogspot.com.  She has oodles of videos.  My opinion of machine quilting went from "pshh, not happening" when I saw her first video to "I could try it once" to "wheeeeee" after my first quilt.

On the half square triangle centre, I did a loopy style of stippling to hopefully emulate the flight of the butterflies that are appliqued in the centre.

Thoughts:  I still need to learn what I am doing wrong or how to fix my wavy edges.  Is it a quilting issue?  Am I a bad measurer?  Do I need to square my quilts better?  Probably it's all of the above.

I used a baby blanket we no longer needed.  I kept the 'satin' binding from the blanket to use on the quilt.

I traded this to a co-worker for some NuCerity.

6 comments:

  1. real cute quilt Lisa! Can't wait to see what else is in your quilting future!
    Godspeed,
    mary

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    1. Thank you Mary, I'm super excited to see what's next too!

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  2. Your quilt is really cute,

    I've heard wavy edges can result if you put the border on the end and then just sew to the other side, and then cut off to match the length. Instead you should pin in the center, and pin towards the outer ends with a carefully measured and cut piece.

    I rarely do borders though. I don't like quilting them because they always get off square.

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    1. Thank you for your tip. Great minds must think alike because several people have given me that same advice! Definitely going to give it a try next quilt.

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  3. Also measure your top in a few places and do the average of those measurements for the border. stretch it a little to make it fit where necessary. a little bit of streching the border to match the top will take care of those waves.

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    1. Yes, I definitely need to do this! I'm getting this piece of advice often. I also liked what Leah had to say - make sure not to pull at the binding as I sew it on

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