I've Been Quilting Baby Quilts!

At the end of last year, I went on a little quilting binge. I was anxious to make another quilt, but didn't need another big one, so I thought I would make a couple smaller ones. At one point I thought about selling them as baby blankets on Etsy. Maybe some day when I get it down! But these two were good practice!

Let me start out by saying, I LOVED the fabric in this collection I found on Missouri Star Quilt's website. At the time I had a neighbor and a sister having a baby boys but I still went the girl route anyways when picking out fabric. I'm not normally a "pink" person either...but I loved the elephants mostly. As soon as I got them in the mail, I set out to sew them the next day after picking out the matching pinking fabric. 

I had a heck of a time getting it square. Luckily my mom was in town and was able to give me a few pointers. After she showed me how to sandwich the quilt top with the batting and the backing, it was a lot more square. Still not perfect, but much better. 

When I serged the edged though it ended up wavy...It drives me nuts. I had been having problems with the tension on the serger, so I feel like that was most of my problem...

After I finished it up, and nearly ran out of thread on the binding, I was so thankful to just be done with it. This was the first quilt that I quilted on my own. I used my small portable sewing machine - the one I curse at a lot. While the back has it's own problems, it's still nice to snuggle up in with Charlotte every so often. 

 For Christmas Perry got his mom and my mom together to go shopping for a new sewing machine for me. I think he was really tired of hearing me curse at the one I had. It got the job done but... So he gathered the mothers together since he knows nothing when it comes to sewing machines, and had them pick one out for me. The one they decided on was a Pfaff Quilting Expressions machine. This machine has free motion quilting on it so I'm able to tell it where to go instead of turning my fabric in hundreds of directions. And it has built in scissors so I don't have to clip my thread when I'm done sewing. Pretty cool! There is also no lever to move the presser foot up and down - it does it automatically! It's the simple things... Anyways, this was the other quilt top I made last year and after quilting the other one, I just stuffed this one away because I was kind of over it. And then I got the machine...

 I've done a few projects on it already, you know, like mending 300 pairs of jeans because my boys clearly use their knees more than their feet... I practiced pebbling a small blanket for Charlotte's babies... I made a Bible cover for Hunter and pebbled it as well... So with that little practice I thought I was ready to get this quilt top out and finish it up.

 I had no idea what I wanted to do to it, but I really liked the flowers and they seemed easy enough. I didn't anticipate doing the square meandering over the whole but it ended up that way. I was going to pebble in between the flowers, but because I was working with flannel, it was really hard to move, so pebbling was out. I'm impressed with how it turned out! An other than the binding, I was able to complete the quilting portion of it while Perry was out of town. (That means I was able to leave all my sewing stuff out on the kitchen counter for the week!)

I've been wanting to make a quilt for my dear friend Britta because she's had a rough year, but she won't pick out a darn pattern she likes! I've got one in mind already, but I did recently fall in love with a hexagon quilt and bought fabric to make it already so hers might be next after this one...