Finished Receiving Blanket Quilt

I finally managed to take and upload some pictures of the finished Receiving Blanket Quilt. Although you'll have to forgive the crappy quality of my photos.  I have a very nice camera and am normally a pretty good photographer, but I work during the day and by the time I get home at night and can take the pictures (once the little one is in bed) it's dark and it's only ugly indoors w/flash photos that I can get.

Here's the front, you can see some puckering but I still think it turned out super cute.

Click the picture to see a bigger version up close.

Here's the back.  As I mentioned before, this is pieced from the remainders of a twin size Pottery Barn flat sheet that matches the bedding in my daughter's room, that I originally cut up to sew her crib sheet. I managed to get this backing out of the L-shaped piece that was left after cutting out the piece for the crib sheet.

Click the picture to see a bigger version up close.

And here's a closeup of the binding.  I love, love, love this pink stripe fabric I used for the binding! I have no idea what it is, I bought it as a remnant at Joann's, but I think it matches perfectly. And I think I did a pretty good job of sewing the binding, you can't see my stitches unless you look REALLY hard.  I used this tutorial for an invisible ladder stitch, it was excellent!

Click the picture to see a bigger version up close.

Now it's time to move to the next quilt. I just have to figure out which one I want to do next!

Oh--I forgot to mention when I posted this earlier...I quilted this on my cheapy little Kenmore machine, using my walking foot and setting the metal stitch guide at an inch and a half.  With six inch squares, this put a line directly through the middle of each square, then another line through the middle of each half of the square.  I then stitched in the ditch to finish it up (although I think maybe I should have done that first, as maybe it could have prevented some of the puckering. Oh well, live and learn.)

I'm a slowpoke

Well, I don't have a finished receiving blanket quilt yet.  I've got the majority of the quilting done, but it is taking forever.  I had to unpick a bunch of the lines I had quilted, losing about an evening's worth of work, because somewhere in the process the stitch guide on the walking foot had gotten pushed over and was at the wrong width so my grid pattern was totally off.  But I've sewn most of the vertical lines, everything except the lines in the seams, and am halfway done with the horizontal ones. 

But, the flannel top is puckering badly as I quilt it. I think it's because it's such cheap flannel from the blankets, and it stretches like mad.  So I'm getting lots of puckers as I cross-quilt across the vertical lines I've already done.  But I don't know how to fix it.  It doesn't look horrible, so I'm just going to leave it and hope when I wash it when it's done, the whole thing will get puckery anyway and kind of disguise it.  Oh well, it's my first try. I hope when I make my next one using regular quilting cottons that I won't have the same stretch problem.  Other than that, it is looking really cute!  But geez louise, it hurts my arms and wrists to push it through the machine and try to keep it all bunched up to fit under the arm.

Hopefully it will be done some point this weekend and I'll be able to put some pictures up.  In the meantime, I'm contemplating some smaller projects for some instant gratification.  I bought two fat quarters of this Michael Miller Christmas fabric on Monday during an outing to a local quilt shop I was visiting for the first time:

Michael Miller Fabrics' Christmas Joyful Damask in Red and Lime

And I'm thinking of making some of these quilted pinwheel coasters from The Long Thread:

Picture from thelongthread.com

I think they'll be cute for the holidays with the two fabrics together, or maybe even as cute little gifts for someone I know.

Receiving Blanket Quilt

I just recently decided that I wanted to try my hand at quilting.  I've had a renewed interest in sewing recently, and have sewn a few bags, and decided I wanted to progress to quilting.

I immediately decided that for my first quilt, I wanted to make one for my daughter, as a kind of memento.  I have had a stack of her receiving blankets sitting in her room for quite some time, since we stopped using them for her, and I had the idea that I would cut up the receiving blankets into squares and piece them together to make her a quilt.  I also decided that I would back the quilt with some leftover sheets that matched her bedroom set.  When I was decorating her nursery, the crib sheet that matched her discontinued bedding set was nowhere to be found, but I could find sets of sheets in other sizes on Ebay (thank you Pottery Barn for making matching bedding sets from crib through queen size!).  I had bought a twin set and cut up one sheet to sew her crib sheet.  I figured I could use the leftover pieces, and the fitted sheet as well, to make a backing for the quilt.

Here's a pic of the Ava bedding, the crib sheet you see here is the sheet fabric I decided to use for the backing.

Pottery Barn's Ava bedding set

With my plan set, I went through the blankets, and picked out six different patterns in pink/white/green colors and patterns to match the PB Ava sheets I was going to use as backing.  I have a pink stripe that reminds me of the pink stripe in the quilted bedding, a couple of tone-on-tone pinks, a white with pink flower, and a green gingham that goes well with the green gingham ribbons on the bedding set.  My hope is that the quilt will nicely match her room, which has the above crib bedding, and also a double bed with the full bedding set on it.

I cut them up into 6 1/2 inch squares, with the plan that I would make a simple 6 square by 8 square quilt top.  I arranged the squares, and then started sewing.  A really horrible, inside-at-night picture of the quilt top pieces is below:

I then sewed the blocks together in rows, then sewed all the rows together.  I pieced the two strips leftover of the twin top sheet that I had cut to sew her crib sheet into a backing.  I've made my quilt sandwich, and just last night I began the quilting process.  I'm doing straight line quilting with the walking foot on my machine at 1 1/2 inch intervals, which results in quilting on every seam, down the center of every block, and then again through each half of the block between the seams and center quilting line.  I got about half done last night, and I'm hoping to do more tonight and maybe even finish it up.

I've already cut my binding strips, I picked out a cute pink and white striped fabric that was a remnant from my stash.  Hopefully I'll have everything completed in the next few days, in time to participate in the Blogger's Quilt Festival!