All Done (Vampire Quilt)

Well, I finished the binding on one of the quilts last weekend - there's only so much you get done when the weather is nice.
Easter weekend, this quilt will go to the little fella - it'll probably be an early birthday gift, since I want to see his reaction when he gets it, and his birthday is not till June...

Time For Some Binding

I'm going away this weekend but am taking the vampire and soccer ball quilts with me to bind. I just have the hand stitching part left, oh, and I guess the label... can't forget that!

The vampire quilt is getting black binding, but for the soccer ball quilt I've pieced all my leftover strips together for a multi-coloured binding. No idea how that'll turn out :)

Vampires Almost Ready For Take-Off

Though I didn't know that March 21 was National (US?) Quilt Day, I spent a lot of it quilting. Before fixing the soccer ball disaster, I needed to do something easier and straight forward, so I finished the quilting on the vampire quilt for nephew nubmer 2.

I started by outlining all the blocks with wonky loopy-loops - very easy and have a great effect on a kids quilt I find. On the border, I just did paralell lines all the way around like a frame.


I decided to machine-quilt bat outlines on each solid colour block; just drew them on by hand as I couldn't be bothered to make a template.


The blue construction zone fabric is so busy, that a bat would just have been lost, so I did snail shells instead, basically spirals with an oval at the end, so they look more like snails.


The overall effect is quite satisfying for me, and I have to say that this quilt definitely came off without a glitch.


One of these nights, I'll test the full effect of the glow-in-the-dark eyes on the back :) I like how the spirals and border lines came out on the back.


Now all I have left if the black binding - it'll have to be single layered because the flanelette is thick enough as it is. I even split the polyester-batting in half to make it thinner, but the seams are still quite thick to quilt over and I was struggling to squeeze the quilt underneat my walking foot...

Ah, it feels good to finish something and have it turn out to your liking! Welcome Spring!

Some Progress On Owls, Soccer Balls and Vampires

Two of the three small quilts I was planning/working on are nearing completion!

I pinned the Owl Quilt...
The overlap of the backing flanelette will be folded around for a border on the top and bottom, and binding.
I also finished the backing for the Vampire Quilt, as well as the borders around the top, and pinned that all together.
I checked, and the eyes do glow in the dark, it looks pretty cool!


For both of these quilt, I ended up piecing batting together, and I tried CrazyMom's method of stitching the edges together instead of simply overlapping them. It's working okay so far.

A big thanks to turning*turning (Mal?), who responded to my query about hexagon-quilting by listing a bunch of useful sites/tutorials on her blog. I used the paper method to piece a soccer ball. When I was halfway through it, it struck me that I could probably have googled it instead of drawing everything out by hand, each piece individually because for some reason, hexagons and pentagons fit better on a curved object than a flat surface, so none of the pieces ended up being quite the same (so no cutting of multiple pieces at once...). I think it worked though, either way, and hopefully I'll manage to sew them all together properly. My first time piecing...

(If only my former supervisor new what good use I've put my MSc thesis draft to...)

Hunter's Vampire Quilt (Patches

Another nephew, another quilt... This one loves heavy machinery and is going through a vampire phase. So when I saw the "Construction Zone" flanelette along with the glow-in-the-dark eyes flanelette, I thought bingo!

I decided on simple, big patches of the construction zone fabric and bright solid colours for contrast and to make it interesting to a little boy. It's probably been the simplest quilt I've pieced so far. I'll put a border around it and that's it for the top. It'll get free-motion quilting all over, in black thread that stands out on the top and blends in on the back.

Here's the backing material, with those great glow-in-the-dark eyes. I should probably test if they actually do glow in the dark... A strip of black on the top and the bottom (I bought the last of the fabric and it's not long enough), black for the binding and that ones done in time for the little guy's birthday. Very satisfying quilting..