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 :)

It Was A Hoot To Make This One

And one quilt that I actually finished last weekend, binding and all, is the owl quilt.
Loved doing this one, too, though I have to say that quilting cotton is more satisfying that quilting flanelette... I look forward to quilting my unfinished cotton quilts :)

Nonetheless, this is another quilt that turned out to my liking. I got to experiment with my first disappearing 9 patch, got to use the cute owl print (of which I have very little left now) and one of my friends will have a lap quilt in the near future.


I was "uncreative" on this one and just did stippling, but I like it for the wavy 3D effect it gives the quilt. Did paralell lines again for the border (top and bottom).



(haha, what luck that I happened to photograph a section of the quilt where all the points are lined up nicely :)

And here's where all the lovely owl print ended up...

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!

The Game Is Saved!

Thank you so much for your comments, the foot/leg was an excellent idea and I've whipped one up this weekend. I also liked the idea to use thread and lots of stitching to create the motion "bouncing" bands. I had experimented with black flanelette, but it was to crass and I don't have gray. So I'll use a zigzag stitch back and forth and will outline it with a straight stitch, probably about 3 strips, staggered up and down going in the space between the ball and the foot do indicate direction. I'm much much happier with the quilt now! Now there's a reason for the ball to be on that quilt ;)

Ball of Despair (Help!!)

Ah, the more I look at my last entry, the more I'm horrified about the quilt top. What was I thinking? If you have suggestions how to save this that don't involve undoing the soccerball quilting I've completed already or unpinning the rest of the quilt, they'd be incredibly welcome.

Maybe I could gift it anonymously??? ... ??

The Process Of Going To Bed

So, the little fellow whom I'm making the soccer quilt for has a birthday coming up soon. Therefore it was time... time to get this quilt done and get the quilt to him, especially since his family also just put their house up for sale and will move a 15-hour drive away. So I plonked myself on the couch yesterday evening and finished stitching on the soccerball. Don't know if it just looks wonky on the photo, I thought it looked pretty round yesterday...


I zoomed right along and pinned the whole quilt. Now, I'm not really happy with the top, it's totally empty, and I think I might add some applique, but to be honest, I don't want to make this quilt a year-long project, and I wonder if the little guy will just think it's a cool soccer quilt, anyway? Just because the quilt doesn't satisfy my grown-up feminine aesthetic doesn't mean a kid won't like it, right? I'm thinking about maybe adding a 3 or 4 curved strips to add some flying motion to the ball, you know, like you see in cartoons. But the coolest thing would be a person on the lawn of course, a main player so to say. Oh, but will I get this done on time?


[Wow, I just looked at this entry on my page, and when you scroll medium-speed up and down the soccerfield and soccerball-sky fabric have this really weird effect of coming at me. That indicates to me that it's a bit too busy, so maybe a large appliqued person would calm it down a bit? Oh gosh, the work though... I like machine piecing so much better... Sigh. I guess I have a couple of weeks to add to the quilt, and it can always be a going away quilt instead of a birthday quilt...]

Here's the backing, just pieced out of left over flanelette from all my kiddie-quilts.

Ah, and then the true quilter came through... it was 10:30 pm, and I just wanted to carry the quilt from the living room, where I pin, to the little quilt room I have. It was all neatly folded to be added to the other pile of pinned quilts waiting for quilting. That pile is growing because my machine doesn't have a way to lower the feet, so everytime I want to do free-motion quilting, I have to take the machine apart and remove the whole structure with the feet. Bit of a pain, therefore I try to do as much free-motion as I can at once before switching back to directional sewing.

Now, because of all the pink-quilt sewing and flanelette sewing, there was a lot of fuzz in the machine, and it was time to clean it, so when I put down the quilt, I thought: "Oh well, I might as well clean and oil the machine tonight and switch the quilting foot and then I'll be ready for quilting tomorrow."

Then I thought, maybe I should quilt the soccerball with the machine instead of by hand, because it'd be faster and look the same as the rest of the quilt, and they're straight lines and it's a small quilt so turning isn't as much of a problem. So I went ahead and did that...

I quilted once around the ball, then on each side of the seam using cream-coloured thread that would show up nicely on the black.

My poor camera didn't know what to do exposure-wise with this black and white contrast...

It went pretty quickly, and I'm happy to say that I made some progress on dropping the perfectionism - weirdly enough, quilting is helping me do that :) The lines aren't all the same distance from the seam and not always perfectly straight...
Okay, this ball is really much rounder than in this picture...

I like the effect on the back. (See, round after all)

Then I took the machine apart for cleaning and oiling... look at all this pink fuzz!

Cleaned and oiled:

Free-motion (darning) foot attached:

And I almost, *almost* started to do free-motion quilting around the soccerball, but it was close to midnight, and the next day, i.e. today was a workday, so I refrained, barely dragging myself away, and closed shop for the night...

Yep, and that's the danger of entering the quilting room on my way to bed!