Rory's Baby Quilt

Yesterday afternoon I finished the quilt.

I have to say I am pretty happy with how it turned out in the end. There was a time during the sewing precess when I was worried that it might look horribly distorted.

This is only the second time I properly quilted after my first experience dampened down my enthusiasm: It was my very first patchwork quilt that I was making for Adrian's first nephew Dara. While I should have picked something simple, being me, I designed something with hearts and circles that I wanted to outline with quilting stitches. I've always enjoyed embroidering and I thought quilting would be very much like it. But far from it! The wadding was very thick and my embroidery hoop kept sliding off, but even when I managed to keep it on, the reverse side looked completely crooked: a circle on the front got distorted into some wonky egg. In the end I managed to make it look kind of right but it took a lot of time and tears (and swearing).

After this I opted for crochet blankets for the next babies and when I ventured another quilt for my nephew Emil I just knotted the layers together. But after five years I decided to give it another try. Again I used the same thick wadding as I still had plenty of it.

Yet I went for an easy design and decided to just quilt along the seams avoiding any curved lines. I also ditched the embroidery hoop which worked out great for me. The quilting didn't go smoothly and there were a lot of wonky lines on the back that I had to undo and redo. But I found that it was easier when I got into a flow of stitching and didn't worry too much about how it looked on the back. 

Not perfect but not terrible either! And Aidan liked the soft wadding.

While the fabric did pucker up a lot, or was stretched too tight in places while I was quilting, it didn't matter in the end. I actually like the three-dimensional look.

As for the edging I meant to do a bias binding but had trouble choosing the fabric. Luckily I visited my aunt in Germany who had just finished an amazing huge quilt. I noticed that for the edging she had just turned over the backing fabric and stitched it to front. She argued that this version is time- as well as fabric-saving - perfect for me! And I like that you can see the backing fabric on the front now as well.

I am itching to do another quilt now!

A baby quilt for Rory

The last week has been very family orientated for me. My sister Bille stayed with her husband and toddler son first at our house and then at my sister Marina's. We spend a lot of time together, chatting away while the boys ran around and did screeching competitions...

... and went to feed carrots to the donkeys. We are so lucky that we all get along so well: we three sisters, the three husbands and now Aidan and Emil, too.

Then on Friday my husbands littlest nephew arrived into the world. Aidan's third male cousin (only one girl so far). We haven't met the newest addition to the family yet as my sister in law lives in England but we hope to visit some time this year. As I seem to have made it a tradition to make a baby blanket for all the babies in our family, I seized the first chance and disappeared into my sewing room to plan a quilt. This is what I have come up with so far:

This is a good few hours work, little as it seems. It sounds fun to pick out the colours and arrange the fabric (and it is), but it's also quite hard to make it look nice. This is not at all what I had in mind at first. I wanted to go for a crazy quilt with lots of patches and ribbons but after playing around with patterns and colors for a while I decided to go for a more traditional look. After all I want this quilt to be finished while Rory is still a baby.
My aunt who is very good at quilting would probably not be happy with this, but as it is only my third quilt I prefer to keep it simple. The next step will be sewing together the squares which shouldn't be too hard. Hopefully more about this in the next post!