New baby quilt

I have been steadily working away on 3 different quilts. Yes, why do one if you can do several at once!

Finished my baby quilt. This one is made out of charm squares and gave me a bit of a headache as I also had obtained a packet of 2 1/2in squares in the same range, somehow thinking that they would make up 4 1/2in squares. Well, they obviously don't and after a lot of internet surfing I finally came up with a combination of designs.

I found the idea with the stars in the center on Pinterest...Vanessa Christensen from the V and Co blog. She had the charm squares and stars arranged this way in a small quilt in some greenish tones. Very pretty. I added some additional borders to use up my 2 1/2in squares...EQ7 came again very handy as the math just did not add up and I needed to do some tweaking. To my big surprise this worked out very well. 

The quilt is by now spray basted and ready to go! Spray basting was definitely a first for me...not sure I like it...got it all over my feet and then spread it all over the floor...bit messy. But I have got something special in mind for this one and spray basting was the better option.

I am planning to do an edge to edge design on it on my HQ Sweet 16. We learned about this in the group I am attending and given that I am really bored with my allover designs this seemed a great option. I selected a design from the EQ Quilting Designs Add-on Program Volume 8 called 'Mini Moonflower Design'. Got very enthused about this and tried it out on a piece of white cotton

While not the most exciting design I thought that this was simple enough to trial on this quilt. I think it suits this little quilt.
In between of course, EQ8 came out and I had to shift my baby quilt from EQ7 to EQ8...today I spent some time on it trying to work out the size of the design and most importantly the placement. While this is all do-able, a bit of planning is a must, particularly as this design is straight across in very definite rows, so I had to make sure it does not sit on every seam line and looks well spread out while still appearing as a consistent overall E2E pattern. The motif consists of 2 rows of flowers and I ended up making this eventually 10in high. The next issue was to pay some attention to the edges and the spacing. EQ 8 was enormously helpful with this...

I worked in Zoom mode and placed my motif where I could effortlessly start...also used that little ruler in EQ8 to measure the approx. distance at points so I have an approximate for placement. I then exported the image using the 'Export Marquee Selection' and pasted it into a Word document, so I can have a look at it when placing the motif on the quilt.

So now I have got a picture of the top left corner and the top right as well as the bottom. Also took an image of the approximate spacing which will be about 1/2in.

Now it is just a matter of doing it! The motif will be stitched out using Golden Threads paper and I will most likely do this in sections. My only fear is that this might not end up straight across for some reason. Well, we shall see...


If this works out I might get some simple pantographs to expand my options a bit in terms of overall designs. Found some really nice ones on the Golden Threads web site. Lots of possibilities!

Karin