Everything was bound, washed and mailed off this morning. 
Baby quilt measured 33.5×33.5″. According to EQ, I was going for 36×36″, so, um, lost something there. Um, I’ll just blame the border. Right?
The mini-quilt, for the big sister, measured 18.75×18.75″. I think I was going for 18×18″. Darn those borders!
Quilt top fabric is from JoAnn’s from the Crunch Monkeys collection and mini-dot in cocoa. The backing is “In the Beginning – The Cat” in flannel by Wendy Slotboom.
So last weekend, Mom did as promised and showed me how to hand sew a binding. I did the machine work and even cut my own binding for this one – the same brown dots from the quilt. The doll quilt, I cut 2″ for double fold binding and got very nervous about how close it was to the edge. I’m not to 1/4″ binding yet! So I cut 2.5″ for double fold for the quilt. Mom showed me the basic stitch (and a blanket stitch, but let’s not get too far advanced!) and did about half the quilt before handing it over. See if you can tell where she stops and I start:
Ha, trick question! It’s actually where I stop and she starts – look, my stitches are more hidden than hers! OK, OK, her’s are way more even. And her corner was way better than mine – though I was getting pretty good by the third corner!
So I spent most of the afternoon stitching the binding and refreshing Facebook. Fun fun! I quickly broke out the new leather thimble to protect my middle finger – and here I thought it was to protect thumbs! After about three hours of work – I was getting faster by the end – I had the whole quilt bound. Woohoo!
And now I need to bind the doll quilt and everything will be in the mail! Before the third trimester, even!
I bought the world’s softest flannel for the backing of this quilt. Love it! Can’t stop touching it!
Decided to double my quilting time by going 1/2″ from the major seams – both the big blocks and the little four patch blocks. Which was a pain when going down the middle of the monkey blocks. Is there plumb-bob for the quilting world? Because I could really use one. But man, other than the crookedness, the back looks great to me! And as a bonus, I got very good at eyeballing 1/2″ – even though I made sure to check it just in case.
I tried pin-basting. Eh, not really impressed. It held it together enough that there was no major slippage, and was easy to get everything in place to trim off the excess flannel, but it was annoying to remove pins as I quilted (not to mention having to redo a section where I sewed over the bottom of the safety pin and couldn’t remove it!) So… Don’t really know how I’ll baste in the future.
On the doll quilt, I quilted a horizontal line, then switched and did a vertical line. Ended up with several bumps in the quilt top. The full quilt I quilted all the vertical lines, smoothing out the top as I went. I was afraid that the backing would end up bumpy, but it ended up fine. I only got a few very minor bumps on the quilt top when I added in the horizontal lines.
And of course, the obligatory cat shot. Tycho thought it was necessary to sleep on the back of my table, right where the quilt was going as I sewed.
After I kicked him off for the fifth time, he gave up and slept in a scrap box instead.
Even though it’s a plain design, I do love simple quilts. Probably because I’m not very good, so easy works best. Four-patch means all I have to do is sew the two colors together, slice ‘em and sew ‘em together the other way.
Of course, it helps if I’m not getting any “assistance” on the cutting table.
Then with everything laid out on the bed, I set up the assembly line!
Sew everything together piece by piece.
Then pressed and put back on the bed neatly so I can keep it in order.
And just like that, the top of both the quilt and doll quilt are done!
(Man I need to get better at taking pictures.)
And now since it’s pouring rain, the Wee One and I are going to watch a movie and baste-pin both quilts!
There’s a bit of a baby boom going in our former squadron. I think this is the last one I need to do before working on my sister’s, my cousins’ for Christmas, my two nieces and the Wee One’s. Woo! (Just by saying that, someone is getting pregnant somewhere.)
But thank goodness, it’s not another airplane quilt! E is having a boy and gave me the nice vague instructions of “monkeys, green and brown.” I already had a green fabric with bananas on it for the jungle themed quilt for my cousin, so I worked from there. I didn’t like the sock monkey fabric Moda has out right now. Didn’t want to use the same Patty Reed jungle babies I already have for my cousin’s.
Finally checked Joanns.com and found out the banana fabric is part of a collection. Unfortunately, the “local” Joann’s doesn’t carry it. And by local, I mean, 90 minutes away. Man, I love living in the middle of nowhere! Online, you have to order an entire yard. So I guess I’ll have a lot of extras.
Hey, I should make a doll quilt for E’s daughter!!
This is the first pattern I came up with, but I couldn’t figure out the dimensions to cut it (does Electric Quilt have this kind of stuff??) and I searched for online instructions, but the quilt block doesn’t exist under the name EQ gives it (right and left.)
It would have looked nice, though! Maybe someday. When I can do math without freaking out and calling my mom to find out the square root of the hypotenuse, or something.
Instead, we’re going for this very simple design. But it goes quite fast and looks nice laid out. And I decided I’m going to quilt about an inch from the seams instead of stitch-in-the-ditch so the quilting pattern is a little more interesting. It’ll give me a chance to see if either of the walking foots (feet?) that came with my new-old Singer work on my regular machine!
