Battenburg Cake Baby Quilt

I finally learned to take a few more pics as I go through a project. Moving on from the colour-run disaster of the first quilt, I have started another.  This one might even make it as a gift for someone...

There was a sale in Spotlight.  $1 fat quarters - I had to get a couple.

The yellow was quite busy with all the coloured flowers so I picked a pale pink solid to go with it.  I cut them into 2 and half inch strips and made six little 9-patch blocks.  

I was advised not to frame them in white as it would make the yellow and pink look 'washed out'.  Clearly, I ignored that advice - sometimes you just have to go with a gut instinct.

Still wanting to do something with the elephant template I made a while back, I decided this was the time for some appliqué.  I made some blocks with elephants and some with flowers.  

The shapes were traced on to double-sided bonding paper and bonded to the wrong side of the pink / yellow fabric before bonding again on to the white block.  I then used a small zig-zag stitch in pink around the outside of the elephants and flowers. The pink elephant also has some decorative stitches for the eye and around the head.  I got a bit carried away...   

Then stitched them all together to make the centre panel:

I then added some pink sashing and a pink border to break up all that white and ended up with a finished quilt top.  The backing is alternate pale pink and lemon blocks in keeping with the Battenburg cake look.

cake.....not quilt.

This is where we're currently at after basting and pinning.  No idea how to quilt this but I've just revisited my last blog and the list of things I supposedly learned from my last quilting experience.  I'm already regretting making the cake-style backing because I didn't get the seams to nest exactly in the centre (again), even although I lined it all up and pinned them in place! note to self: keep the backing simple.  Hey, at least I pre-washed all the fabric this time :-)

This photo doesn't really do it justice - it's so pretty and very girly.  2 of my friends already know that they are having girls so I'm hoping that it will end up good enough to give as a gift once I've been let loose with the walking foot.  I'll post some updates when I get there...

*UPDATE* - So this is the trouble with adding fancy stuff to the middle of the quilt where you have to start quilting.  What was I thinking?  I tried quilting over the top of an appliquéd elephant on a practice block a while back - it didn't really work out so I tried going around it - that didn't really work either... This time I decided to stipple around the elephants - it looks ok on the front but the back will have big spaces where the elephants are.  Didn't really think that through, did I?

Another update: I have now finished this quilt and was pleased with the front until a bird left me a little message all down the front while it was drying on the line.  After the second wash, some of the appliqué started to lift. where I had just caught the very edge with the needle - it frayed back too far past the stitches so I had to do some repairs to the pink elephant and it now looks a bit rubbish...

More photos - pre birdie accident. This actually isn't a great pic in this light...

And the back...

Lessons learned:

• Keep the back all the same fabric until you're better at piecing and quilting. 
• Try just quilting right over the top of that appliqué to avoid any gaps on the back. 
• Definitely don't try to machine the binding on.  This one was machined to the front of the quilt and hand finished at the back.  Took ages but the results were so much better than previous attempts to do all of the binding by machine. 
• White backgrounds are ok :) 

 

First Quilt

So the first attempt at a quilt started out ok-ish.  I thought I would start simple so I got some 5" squares and sewed them together pretty randomly. Some squares came from a charm pack from Lincraft and the others were in my stash.  The only 'planned' piecing was to have the 4 dark blue squares in the centre of each 9-square block. It was supposed to be scrappy and I thought maybe it would make a good baby quilt or play mat (lots of our friends are pregnant at the moment).

Well, for a 'simple' quilt, I had issues from the start. When I joined my rows together, not all of the seams matched up exactly which meant that a lot of my points were off. Booo.

The dark blue fabric took me a while to find and of course as soon as I got it home, I started cutting it up and sewing it together....before pre-washing. D'oh. More on that later...

I used bamboo batting for this quilt - I've got nothing else to compare it with but it did seem to shed a lot of fluff as I was working with the quilt.  I've picked cotton batting for the next project so I'll see how that compares. The cotton stuff feels better...

I should have taken more pics as I went along but as usual, I forgot...This is a photo of the front after quilting:

Given that many of my corners didn't line up neatly, I couldn't really stitch in the ditch, which I think would have been the easiest option as a beginner, so I went for a shadow square within each square.  Bad choice - there aren't two squares the same size on the entire quilt top and having to pivot the quilt a million times at the corners became quite tedious. I've been practising free motion quilting following video tutorials from Leah Day's Blog but I'm still doing something wrong - the tension on the stitches at the back of the quilt is wrong and it doesn't improve by adjusting the needle tension. I read somewhere that the problem is related to the speed with which you move the quilt around relative to the speed of the needle. I don't think I'm ever going to get the hang of the free motion stuff. Anyway, I used it here on the borders of this quilt. I used a contrasting sand coloured thread when I probably should have used a matching thread to hide the dodgy stitches :-)

This is a closer look at the free motion action - I believe this is called meandering or stippling:

It looks ok in these pics but trust me, some of the stitches are pretty ugly and the back is scary...

Can't really see the detail here - probably a good thing...I had a bit of puckering on the back too.  Again, not sure how to fix that as you can't actually see the back of the quilt when you're quilting and therefore don't know that it's puckering. It's a minefield.

I used the same fabric as the backing for the binding and I decided to machine-bind it.  I cut binding strips at 2 1/2" and I used that finishing method where you create a pocket in one of the binding tails and slot the other tail inside.  I wouldn't use this method again - it's way too bulky. I did use a matching thread for the binding and I'm glad I did - it's pretty shocking.  Very difficult to keep a completely straight line.  I also had to unpick half of my stitches because the bobbin thread got into a big loopy, tangled mess on the underside and I didn't spot this until I had finished.


This is the finished quilt (taken at night so the lighting isn't great):

Given that I hadn't washed the dark blue backing / border fabric I ran out and got some Colour Catch - which is supposed to 'catch' colour and stop it from bleeding into other fabrics.  I thought it had survived the wash but now that it's dry, I can see that the colour has in fact transferred to the lighter squares.  Disappointing.

So, lessons learned from this first little quilting project:

1. Pre-wash fabric.
2. Accuracy with quarter inch seams - it's important later.
3. Accuracy with nesting seam lines so that stitching in the ditch is an option for quilting.
4. Learn which direction to iron the seams when piecing.
5. Did I mention that you should pre-wash the fabric?
6. Keep designs on the back simple - sometimes the quilting pattern on the front won't work on the back.
7. Reconsider the bamboo batting.
8. Finish the binding tails by stitching on the bias rather than tucking to minimise the bulk.
9. Hand finish the binding on the back of the quilt.
10. Until you get better at quilting, use a matching thread to disguise your nasty wobbly stitches :-(

I did say at the start that this might end up in the dog's bed, particularly if the colour-run thing didn't go to plan:

He seems to like it...

*UPDATE* - Bought some Colour Run stuff from Dylon and it seems to have worked.  It involved washing the quilt in a hot wash at 60 degrees, which can't have been good for it but since it was trashed anyway, I had nothing to lose.  The dark blue has washed out of the lighter squares (hurrah!) but the dark blue isn't too dark any more.  On a serendipitous note, the quilt now looks vintage, which was what I wanted from that  indigo fabric in the first place - it's a bit 'faded jeans'. It has also shrunk a bit, giving that crinkly look which has done wonders for my dodgy quilting stitches.  It looks a bit too shabby chic to give away as a gift but I'm now quite pleased with the end result.