Confidence Quilt #2 – Charm Squares Baby Quilt

First, my mom sent me lots of details about the vintage quilt I posted about. I’ll follow-up on that shortly.

When I first started knitting, I made a lot of hats. A LOT of hats. And the hats I made, I made with the yarn recommended in the pattern. I knew I could substitute yarns, I just wasn’t experienced or confident enough to branch out and try new things. While some knitters will tackle a complicated adult-sized fair-isle sweater as their first knitting project, or even argyle socks, I know how I operate. For me, it’s all about baby steps to instill confidence to keep going.

I’m doing the same thing with my quilting. Behold, the beginning of Confidence Quilt #2:

This is the Charm Squares Baby Quilt pattern from Oh Fransson! on Sew Mama Sew! (Gotta love the exclamation points!). I’ve discovered that for me, the absolute most difficult part of quilting is choosing the fabrics. It’s the step that stops me in my tracks. Let’s face it, if I don’t like a yarn I’m using for a particular project, I can unravel and reuse it. But after you chop up your fabric with a rotary cutter, well, there’s just no going back.

Enter the charm pack, a bundle of 5″ squares of a line of fabric that are designed to work together (in this case, Verna by Kate Spain, which I absolutely love). For this quilt, I had to choose about half of the pack to cut in two for the smaller pieces, then choose the order they were sewn together. To save myself from fretting over each square’s placement, I relied on chance. I grabbed half of the squares randomly to cut in half for the smaller pieces, then chose again randomly for the final placement. A couple of tweaks here and there to avoid similar fabrics in the same row, and voila! Placement was complete.

I’m holding off quilting it together until I practice my machine quilting a little more. I’m hoping to put some pot holders together this weekend, and practice machine quilting those for some practice. But I’m telling myself I don’t have to be perfect, because quilting is going to take practice just like knitting did. Any forward momentum is good, as long as I’m still having fun!