Our friends are having a baby, and I decided to make a quilt for the new little one. This is the first quilt that I made specifically to give away as a present. All my quilts have still been paper piecing, and most of them came from Fandom in Stitches, so I looked to their free patterns to figure out what I wanted to make. At first I thought since it's a girl, and her sisters like the Disney Princesses that I could make a princess quilt. But I couldn't figure out which ones would be best. Instead I went with the always classic Sesame Street. It was an easy decision of Elmo and Cookie Monster.
I finally finished assembling the quilt top, but there is no time to take it in to get quilted, so I'll have to learn how to quilt and do it myself. Lucky for me, my mother has been quilting for years, so she can show me all the ins and out of how to get it done.
After a lesson, I decide to do a meandering pattern with loops, it's a pretty simple pattern, I can "make it up" as I go. I took a video of me doing the quilting, it's not terribly interesting, but you can see the meandering and the loops. When quilting, it's important to try to keep moving the quilt through the machine the same speed to keep the stitches the same length. I think it turned out pretty good.
Here is a close up of the quilting. The picture didn't really come out well, but you can see the meander and the loops. I'm no longer under the thumb of big quilt, charging me an arm and a leg to quilt my quilts. I can do it myself now.
I'm already thinking about my next quilt, and what pattern I'll be using for it. It's a half finished space invaders pixel quilt. I put it on the back burner because I wanted to finish this one before the baby is born. For the record, it was finished in time. I even made this blog post before the baby was born, but I had to wait to post it until after they got the quilt.
And here it is.. complete
