Confidence Quilt – Complete!

Early Sunday afternoon, I was hemming and hawing over this whole quilting thing. I wanted to do it, but feared that I’d be horrible at it.

Then I remembered some of the not-so-great items I made when I first started knitting, and realized – you have to start somewhere, right?

So I plucked up my courage, and made a baby doll quilt. I had most of it done in one afternoon. I followed the instructions in the Doll Quilt Sew-Along on the Sew Mama Sew site, and took it one step at a time.

Note: I dug through my fabric scraps to find a few that kinda sorta went together. These fabrics were purchased online a few years ago on a complete whim, and I’ve been holding on to them because I had no idea what to do with them. They are, shall we say, BOLD fabrics.

Step one: Cut the fabric. With the rotary cutter. Which was not as scary as I thought it would be.
Step two: Piece the fabric together. I used the Singer Featherweight for this step, and it went fairly smoothly. Some of the points could have lined up a little better, but I figure that comes with practice:

Step Three: Make a quilt sandwich. Basically, lay the backing fabric down, then a layer of batting, then the quilt top. Pin together.

Step Four: Quilt the layers together. Here’s where my sewing got a little wonky, since I don’t have a walking foot. I stitched into the ditch (meaning, I stitched along the piecing seams) but I let the machine get away from me a few times, so they aren’t the perfect lines I was hoping for.

After the quilting, trim the extra batting and backing away:

That’s as far as I got on Sunday.

Step Five: On Monday, I machine sewed the binding on the right side (using the tutorial at Oh! Fransson) and then hand sewed the binding down on the back side (using the tutorial from Splityarn).

Done!

Here’s what I noticed: There was no one step that really had me stuck. Each required careful attention and precision and accuracy, but none of them were completely over my head. I figure with practice, I’ll learn the mechanics better, and over time I’ll get better and better at each aspect of the process.

As a confidence builder, this project was a success. I still have a lot to learn, but as Mr. Martini said when I showed him this mini-quilt (after complimenting it and calling it beautiful – he’s a good nut):

Mr. M: So basically, you did everything you need to do for a big quilt, right?

Me: Yup.

Mr. M: You’d just have to do more squares, and do everything on a larger scale.

Me: Right.

Mr. M: So you could make a big quilt now.

Me: Yup.

He didn’t come right out and ask for a new quilt, but when I told him I wanted to make a couple of lap quilts for the living room so we can get rid of our linty, sheddy, hard to wash chenille afghans, he was pretty excited.

I am, too. Now to work on the hardest part for me: Picking out fabrics. Wish me luck!