WIP #3: Baby Quilt finished

Finally...the baby quilt is finished. Bound, washed and blocked...all done

Came out very crinkly, but I like the feel of it. What a saga. Felt compelled to redo it as the zebra fabric was the wrong way around...while a bit of a hassle, I am glad I have done it, because I would have cringed every time I looked at it if I did not correct this.

Karin

FMQ Friday - Loops and More Loops

Finished quilting the baby quilt with my loop design

Bit hard to see, here is the back

I had a fair bit of bearding going on while doing the quilting. I used bamboo batting and while I think they have improved on it (it did quilt beautifully), this was a bit annoying.  In case you have not come across this... I used this nifty roller that we got from Ikea to clean up the fluff. All it is is a roll of sticky tape.  You run it over the surface and when all the sticky tape is taken up with fluff you just peel off that layer to reveal a new sticky layer. Ingenious ...we got this initially to get rid of the cat hair on our clothes...you can buy the refills in packets of six, I think...really cheap.

 

 

Another issue I thought I share...I had spoken about the pesky basting pins and that they often leave black marks if you leave them in too long. Well, given that this is a light background I took care to sort through my basting pins when I was putting it together, making sure I only used the newer ones...Well, another black mark where the pin held the fabric...(not really too bad, I had worse). This was happening literally in front of my eyes as I was quilting it and was the reason that I hurried this along a bit.

 

 

It occurred to me last night what this is all about...it was fairly hot over here when I was doing the quilting. Temperatures were in the high 30s and we were running the air conditioner just about non-stop. We have evaporative cooling and so with time, I reckon the humidity builds up to such an extent that the basting pins are literally rusting in front of your eyes! Need to make a mental note only to quilt dark stuff in summer. I wonder whether this would also happen with the use of Pinmoors and the regular pins...



Photo of the finished quilt coming up shortly.

Linking up to Leah Day's Freemotion Quilting Friday

Karin

WIP Wednesday: Progress

Made some progress this week. Here is my table runner

Will post more detailed FMQ shots about this one on Friday. While nice, it lacks a bit of planning, i.e. I should have thought more about the quilting of the actual blocks. Border is beautiful but I was left wondering what to do with the blocks (which ultimately produced some unevenness in the quilting...hmm, maybe I should have used a filler design over the blocks...

And here is me hard at work on my baby quilt. Have decided on a loopy - loop design . In order to keep me focussed I had to have my drawing of the design next to me the whole time just to refer to the scale of the design and also to check every now and then in which direction I was going.  Loops are easy to stitch, however I don't find it that easy to fill up an area with any level of consistency. I am aiming for a scale of about an inch over a 3 - 4in area, so have to have a fair bit of speed to make those more sweeping kinds of movements. Very easy to then get lost in it all and end up too close or between some loops. So far, so good...half way through

Linking up to  WIP Wednesday over at Freshly Pieced. (guest hosted by Claire from Sewing Over Pins)

Karin

WIP #3: Baby quilt

Pressing ahead...

Worked out what I want to do for my baby quilt in terms of all-over design

 Had to draw this a couple of times to experiment with the size. Now this does not look very difficult but loops can be tricky. Easy to back yourself in a corner when you are going the wrong direction. I am aiming for a scale of about 1 in circles spread over a 3in space.














Tested this on the fabric. Initially I was going to use light orange thread but I decided to go with cream. The quilt top is busy enough and the light orange will show any little irregularity in roundness of the loops and compete with the blocks. I think I will go for the blend in effect...

Linking up to Anything Goes Linky Party at Stitch by Stitch 



Karin

WIP #3: Baby Quilt top finished

 

Hard to believe, but I finished the baby quilt top...yes, I made it again!








If you followed my earlier posts about this quilt, I realised that the direction of the fabric did indeed matter in the construction of the quilt. Unfortunately I only realised this after I had the quilt top just about finished. As I am planning to put this pattern on Craftsy or something similar, I did not want to lead people down the garden path as the mistake was in the construction of the blocks...hence my pattern needed to be altered (although with my fabric you would hardly notice the difference as the zebras are facing up and down, as do the clouds - however if you had fabric where direction mattered you would need to pay attention to this).

Had to have a bit of a break at that point, but re-wrote my instructions properly the other day and made the whole thing again, checking my instructions as I went along. Worked great ...was very happy with my write up and glad to be coming to an end. I did end up making the quilt a bit bigger and managed to get more of the zebra fabric which I will now use as the backing. Figure this, the same fabric still available after more than half a year! All that is left to do is to finish off the quilt, do some grammatical changes and formatting and I am ready to go. This is actually a nice little quilt to make and one that you could finish off in a weekend.

It will be interesting to see whether this will generate any interest but given that I have been talking and thinking about this for a good year by now, I just need to make it happen. No time for doubts. This will take some pressure of and I can then think about where I would like this idea to go.

Linking up to Anything Goes Linky Party at Stitch by Stitch and Let's Get Acquainted LinkUp at Plum and June this Monday hosted by Janice at Better Off Thread

Karin