Butterfly Baby Quilt – Back & Quilted

I don’t know if this is the back or the front any more. I do know I’m not happy with it any more! It didn’t come close to squaring up right, the Magic Chalk didn’t work so I ended up quilting it stitch-in-the-ditch, and I was short 2.5″ of the stripe-y flannel, so I had to go to Hobby Lobby and OF COURSE the pattern was horizontal instead of vertical so I had to buy a half yard instead of 3″! Argh!

The only good news (besides that it’s done!) is that I had enough leftover brown dots from the monkey quilt to bind it.

I still have to fold over the binding and hand sew it. Busy work for the car ride to OKC tomorrow!

Butterfly Baby Quilt – What’s in a Name? (And a Butterfly?)

Well, that was time-consuming! I’m now in awe of anyone who can do big quilts with lots of little pieces. I spent the last two days standing up and walking between my bed, ironing board, sewing machine, and sitting again.

There are 64 individual pieces of fabric in the name Ashley.

There are 27 individual pieces of fabric in a butterfly block. I made four…that’s 108 pieces sewn together.

(Name sewn, one butterfly sewn, two laid out.)

But finally, after way too much work, her name is done, and so are four butterflies! I did almost all of it in chain sewing, but I had to keep everything laid out on the bed and couldn’t get too many steps ahead or I’d get lost and sew something wrong. And I had very little of the stripes left to work with, so I couldn’t get anything wrong. But see, they’re all facing the right direction!

Now all I have left is joining all this together with some stripe-y flannel to make the back (or front?) of the quilt, then I’m breaking out the free-motion pattern. (Is that an oxymoron?)

Butterfly Baby Quilt – Using the Alphabet

At first I thought this was going to be a quick and easy quilt, beyond the complication of free-motion quilting for the first time. Then I thought it would be a good idea to put her name on it.

Yeah, alphabets suck. EQ gives you the option of lots of corners and intricacies, so I sketched out something simpler on graph paper. Even that has been complicated to cut! And I still haven’t done the triangle pieces to make the corners. But I do know how many of each I need, and wrote myself a reminder on how to cut the stripes…

Can you see her name?

Tomorrow I’ll cut out the eight corners and see if I can sew it all together without messing up. We’ll see!

Butterfly Baby Quilt – Fabric and Pattern

I have a new niece! And man, nieces are way more fun to sew for than nephews, not that I don’t adore her big brother. But boys can get cool Christmas jammies. Girls can get pink EVERYTHING!!

But new baby means new baby quilt. I wasn’t going to work on hers right away, since I have a pile to work through, but I saw this butterfly fabric at Prairie Quilt and, well, I can’t not buy fabric. I forgot to take a picture of the fabric before starting, but there’s a bit of it in this picture:

Cloud in Fairy Frost and a purple batik for Tine’s Cinderella quilt, brown and beige butterflies from Marcus Brothers’ Close to My Heart, a pink batik and a Precious pink dotted flannel by Teresa Kogut for P&B Textiles, Debbie Mumm’s snowflake flannel from JoAnn’s — oh, and an obnoxious cat.

The fabrics were supplemented with a striped cotton from Hobby Lobby, and I’ve got a striped flannel for the border, also from Hobby Lobby.

The pattern is pretty simple, obviously, and was chain stitched in less than an hour. I have more leftover than I thought, so I’m going to attempt letters for the first time and put her name on the bottom of the back. Also, a butterfly, since my incredibly graphically un-enabled husband said it’s not a butterfly unless there’s an ACTUAL butterfly on it. And I have enough of that pink batik left. Something like thus:

And, big step for me, I bought a butterfly quilting stencil! This is going to be my first attempt at free motion quilting and I’m nervous… But I’m armed with the stencil and some Magic Chalk and I’m ready to try. Wish me luck!