Gorgeous Baby Quilt Coming Up

I am working on several projects at once...as always! Finished my gorgeous baby quilt top though. This one is for us, however I will write up the pattern for my Etsy shop in due course. For once I did take good notes while I was making it, so hopefully that won't take too long.

It's absolutely gorgeous fabric! Acquired from a local quilt shop that put together a selection of 'Cottage Grove' fabrics from Art Gallery Fabrics for a Fat Quarter bundle. The quality is outstanding and even after washing the fabric, it felt just superb. I complemented this with some Kona Solid greens to make the stars. Really like the combination of the soft pinks and greens. As usual I changed my mind about borders and ended up buying more fabric only to realize that my border fabric was directional and needed to be placed lengthwise on the sides of the quilt top. What a hassle! Had to do some tricky math to work out how I was going to make this go all around the quilt. In the end I did not exactly pattern match as I would have lost inches of fabric doing this and this fabric was not exactly cheap. I got some fabric left from my Fat Quarter bundle and am thinking of putting another little baby quilt together from that, possibly just doing a Charm Square quilt or similar. I think I might still have enough for a smallish quilt. We'll see.

The last few days I have been torturing myself with trying to work out a Zig-Zag border for another Freemotion-quilting workshop. Should have been quite simple and it was until I decided to look at various different dimensions and shifting my Zig-Zag around. I was looking at Cindy Needham's stencil out of her Border package, but then could not work out the dimensions that were used to produce this stencil. I was there for days until I realised how that stencil was structured! I ended up doing mine a bit different and had to take a deep dive into how to make borders fit a particular length of quilt as I will need to talk about that if I want people to be able to follow the instructions for the borders. Got myself utterly confused a number of times (as usually happens with borders for me) and had to really knuckle down and work this out properly. In the end I used my Affinity Designer Pro program to draw my borders out and check the measurements to make sure I can actually explain how I got to the dimensions chosen and apply this to other borders. Always sounds so simple, i.e. just look at the repeat and either reduce or enlarge as you need it...I was there doing fractions galore, but it definitely helped to have  a visual via the drawing program so I could see what I was doing and where my thinking went a bit wonky at times.

Have a little sample project that I will be stitching out shortly to see how much time is involved in that little skillbuilder workshop. This is for the second half of the year so lots of time still but I want to get this done so that I can discuss it further with the shop owner in terms of what she wants size wise. My sample is based on a 2in zig-zag so it will turn out rather small. I am thinking to make it a 3in zig-zag for the workshop as that allows more space for filler designs. We'll see...

Apart from that lots of UFOs and charity quilts waiting to be quilted. My gorgeous baby quilt is next with a special edge-to-edge design and then I need to write up the pattern.

Will try to post a bit more regularly again once I get back to the actual quilting!

Until then...enjoy what you are working on!

Karin