Banner Quilt

I have made a few quilts in my years of sewing, but this is by far my favorite.  Decided to research a bit, ask questions of my quilting friends, and do this right.  I am beyond happy with the result!

Last spring I bought these fabrics, just because I really liked them. I'll admit it, I'm a fabric junky.  The base fabrics are Heidi Grace prints from JoAnn's, and the rest coordinate. I wanted to make a baby quilt, but couldn't decide on a pattern.

Spent an hour or so looking on my pinterest quilt board, and chose an isosceles triangle design. See the third print from the left? It was a no brainer.  The pin linked to a blog post that was a quilt-a-long, so that was really helpful.  She used a triangle quilt template, I improvised with a 30, 60, 90 triangle handed down to me from my dad. He built homes for a living, and drew all his own blue prints. A couple pieces of electrical tape and I can start cutting.

Started cutting an even number of print and white triangles, laid them out and rearranged until I was happy.  I began sewing the triangles together, one row at a time.

I remembered a little travel iron my mom snagged for me at a garage sale. Set my sleeve board next to my machine, and I pressed each seam as I went.  

Once all the rows were stitched, I matched seams and sewed the rows together. Starting to look really good!

Time to lay out my quilt sandwich. I did it on carpet and tacked the back with pins to keep it nice and taught, then laid my warm & white batting, then the quilt top.  

This is the only picture I took of this process. This is the back, face down, pinned to the carpet.  After the layers were safety pinned together, I took these straight pins out and started quilting, 1/4" on each side of each seam. 

I used my walking foot, and if you have one, I would highly recommend it. The top foot feeds your fabric along with the feed dogs below, keeping your layers moving evenly. 

Forgot to take any pictures of the binding process, but used the method most of the directions suggested. Machine stitched to the top, and hand stitched to the back.  The angled edges proved a little challenging, but after a couple tries I got the hang of it.

Couldn't wait to wash it, and give it that crinkly, cotton batting quilt look. I wasn't disappointed.

The backing fabric is flannel, making it even more snuggly!

After washing it I remembered I wanted to sew a quilt label on.

Printed on a piece of fabric, sewed a little banner on, and hand stitched it to the back. 

A couple more pictures, just because.

Quilting might be my new favorite thing. Problem is parting with it when I'm done. Not sure about this one, I may have to hang onto it. The colors and pattern are really my favorites. 

Here is the link to the isoceles quilt along, if you'd like to try one.

Mommy by Day Crafter by Night isosceles-triangle-quilt-along

Thanks for stopping by!

Karilyn

Scrappy Brown Quilt

Wow, time sure flies!  I planned to blog at least once a week, or perhaps more, but the weeks go by without stopping to tell me.  Anyway, it's been a week and a half, and I need to get posting.  Last year, when I discovered the wonderful, addicting Pinterest, I starting pinning way more projects that I could probably do in a lifetime.  But, when I need inspiration, it's so fun to go back to my boards and find a project.  Some of the ideas just stick in my head, and won't go away until I try them.  Some are successes, some epic fails!

I have a friend I follow on Pinterest, who pins tons of quilting ideas.  Now, I sew constantly, but quilting has never been my cup of tea.  I have made a couple of quilts for my daughters bed, but that's about it.  One of her pins was for a Raw Edge Layer Cake Quilt, that looked so simple and quick, I was dying to try it.

So off I went to Hobby Lobby to buy and cut my own cake layers.

Here they are all washed, pressed and cut into 10" squares.  I decided to make a crib size quilt. (to sell, I won't be needing anymore crib size quilts!)  I cut 30 squares, 5 across by 6 down, and 30 of the polka dot fabric for the back.  I have a zig zag blade for my rotary cutter, so I used that.  

Then I cut 30 9" squares of fusible quilt batting.  The idea is to fuse the quilt layers together, quilt each square, and then sew the squares together.  I wasn't too impressed with the fusible batting.  It only stuck on one side, and by the time I was done pressing it, it was pretty flat.  It fluffed up again after washing, but I'll try something different when this package is gone.  

After this step, the squares went to my mom, who loves hand sewing.  She just moved to a retirement community where the ladies meet every other week to visit and sew.  So I thought I would supply her with a project to bring!  We decided to sew 2 squares in the center of each block, a 6" and a 3" inside it.  It only took her a couple of weeks to get it done.

I then laid the squares out on the floor in a pattern I liked, and started sewing the blocks together into rows, and then the rows together.

You stitch the pieces together with the seam allowance exposed on top.  Check out the tutorial here for much better directions. It went really quick!

I followed quilt binding instructions here. It worked really well.  I machined stitched it to the front, pressed it around to the back and then sent it home with mom to hand stitch it to the back.  She finished the binding, and then snipped the seam allowances every 1/2" or so.  Then all that's left to do is throw it in the wash a few times to "rag" it up.

It turned out so cool.  I love it!

If anyone is in the market for a crib quilt, let me know.  I have one for sale!!