My First Quilt

Inspired!

I thought it would be good to tell you the story of how I made my first quilt and the many, many things I learned along the way.

It started out simple enough.  I found the cutest quilt in the book Little Birds, that was submitted by Anita Peluso.  It had these little appliqued birds with feathery crazy stitching that were just my style.  

So much cute stuff in this book and a lot of different techniques to explore.

I love big, bright colors and wanted to have a blanket just for me that was a reflection of this. Especially since I. LOVE. BLANKETS.

How much do I love blankets?  Um, a lot.  They're everywhere.  I usually have two on the couch and two on the bed and several in the craft room for my occasional TV watching in there.  This is true even in the summer, which leads my husband to sit far, far away from me on the couch and give me not so surreptitious, "what is wrong with you!" looks, AND sometimes he says that out loud too.  

So I think to myself, wouldn't it be awesome to have a fabulously cute quilt that I could wrap around the bottom of my feet, both of my sides and pull up to my chin?  Why, yes, yes it would. Do I think to myself, "Wow Whitney, that's a pretty big quilt for a first endeavor?"  

You guessed it, nope, never even crossed my mind.

A sampling from the fabulous Fandango line.

Given this, what does an ambitious, excited, and impulsive girl do?  Go straight to Fabric Depot, of course!  I had seen Kate Spain's new, at the time, Fandango collection and knew that was what I wanted to use for my quilt.  Popular fabric lines go quickly at Fabric Depot so I wanted to get in while the getting was good.

What have I gotten myself into?

After I brought home my load of beautiful, new fabric, I dutifully got out the book to look at the pattern so that I could dive right in.  You can imagine my surprise when after some confusion at the cutting instructions, I looked to see the finished size of the quilt and it was just 16" x 18.5"!  Oh no.  What to do?  I bought 10 yards of fabric and had my heart set on the super-size throw with cute little birds.  

I know, I know.  How could I just rush into such a huge fabric purchase and project without reading all the instructions first?  Yeah, I do that sometimes.  I have also been known to start a baking project two hours before an event only to realize that I am supposed to let something chill overnight in the fridge.  It's a real problem.

Hmm.  Thinking, thinking.  I know, I will just make squares and some of the squares will have the little birds on them!  Even though I had never made a quilt before, I had seen a colleague working on one during her lunch once and when I asked about how you make a quilt, she told me, "It's simple.  You just sew your squares into a row and then sew the rows together."  Well, okay, I can do that.  I did some quilt math and decided to cut 6.5" squares. My finished quilt would be 60" X 72" with two borders of different widths.  Why did I decide to add borders?  I have no idea.  At this point, I didn't even own a single quilting book, so who knows where that came from.

New Skills

Now that I had a plan, I set off on my first rotary cutting mission.  It was a challenge.  But after some initial frustration, I got all my fabric cut up into squares.  That's right, I cut it all.  Again, not having any experience at this, I didn't even think about the fact that I was only going to need 6-7 of each kind of fabric, not 20 plus.  To this day, I have a very large pile of 6.5" Fandango squares awaiting a new inspiration.



Then took my cream colored squares to make my little birds and owls.  They came out so cute!  I enlarged the patterns from what was in the book so they will fill up my squares a little better.  The process was tedious but so worth it :) 



My first little bird!

Once I had my little friends completed, it was time to lay out all the blocks.  I took my pile of squares over to my mother's house to make use of her massive table.  After lots of swapping of blocks and proverbial mustache scratching, we had a plan.  I marked all my pieces with little scraps of paper to indicate their proper position, re-stacked my piles and set off home.



Three rows complete.

The sewing went pretty smoothly.  I found out that my machine has a setting for piecing that puts the needle in a position so that you just line the fabric up with the edge of the presser foot and get a perfect 1/4" inch.  I love that feature!

Before I knew it, all my blocks and rows were together!  I was pleasantly surprised that most of my seams lined up quite well.  I think that I was more patient then than I am now with my piecing.  I found adding the borders pretty straightforward, but cutting across the width of the fabric made me quite nervous, in fact, it still kinda does.

And voila, a quilt top!  Wow, this is exciting!  I even used the little embroidery option on my machine to put my initials and the year on it (something I have stopped doing and I'm not really sure why).

Hooray, a completed quilt top!

 

Cool, on to the next part, right?

Quilt Sandwiches

My excitement and momentum had carried me through the quilt top in just a few weeks. But I had no idea where to start with the next part.  First, I hymned and hawed over what to use for the backing for quite some time.  Originally, I planned to use a solid green fabric but, my quilt math was off and I didn't buy enough.  I made several different plans to piece something together, but it was not making me feel happy.  Finally, I just went back to Fabric Depot and purchased adequate yardage of a print from the line that I hadn't used on the quilt top.  I was over at my mother's again to cut my yardage in half.  I think I measured like six times, I was so nervous.  I got the back sewn together and was ready for the next step.  

What the heck is the next step?  A book purchase was in my future.  After searching around for a good book on quilting basics, I ended up with a copy of Quilting: The Complete Guide.  I still find this book useful.  Even though a lot of the photos are of more traditional quilts and patterns, it has had the answer to just about every question I have had.  The explanation of the quilt sandwich made enough sense, but I was still daunted, so the quilt top sat,


and sat,


and was still there after that.

Finally, almost two years later, some friends were getting together to have a craft night and I knew one of them was a quilter and that this was my chance!  I packed up the quilt top, backing and batting, lots of safety pins and headed out to craft night looking like I was moving into the place.  My lovely friend, Jane, was so wonderful and showed me the ropes of making a quilt sandwich.  I am forever indebted to her for helping me through it!

Almost There

That major hurdle conquered, the next dilemma was the actual quilting.  I had no idea what I wanted to do for a design.  I loved the all over meandering designs I had seen but after a very short experiment with some scraps, I knew that wasn't going to happen unless I was going to wait another two years to finish, and that would be a no.  Also, I didn't want to quilt over the little birds.  Another issue, I was trying to figure out how far apart my quilting could be.  Again, after speaking with a friend's mom, who is a very experienced quilter, I settled on doing two straight lines to outline the seams, like so:

The quilting process was, shall we say, interesting.  So many things that I didn't think about.  I was prepared for the fact that I was going to need to roll and stuff the quilt against the inside of the machine, it was still a pain, but I wasn't surprised.  The biggest surprise was quilts are HEAVY.  The quilt pulls whatever direction most of it is, whether that be forward, to the side or out the back of the machine.  That means that it is really hard to get even stitching.  That became clear pretty quickly and I basically decided that if it was quilted, it was good and went from there.  I finished the quilting without too much fuss and was so pleased with how it turned out.  The pattern looked great on the back too.  All that was left was the binding.



Now, apparently, there are all these cool fabric folding tricks that make cutting binding a breeze, but I dind't know any of these tricks or that they existed so my process contained some expletives.  However, after I got the fabric cut and realized that you don't line up triangles exactly when you sew them,  my quilting book helped me with exactly what I needed to do.  I was so happy with how my mitered corners turned out!  Then I hand stitched the binding to the back, I couldn't believe that is was really finally coming together and so as a little pinch, I snapped a few in-progress photos.

I have come to learn that stitching down the binding is my favorite part, since you get to "test-drive" the new quilt as it sits on your lap during the stitching :-)  The husband also refers to this as my "quality assurance" part of the process.

And that means, it was done.  Finally, done.  I was, and am still, so proud of my accomplishment.  My quilt has since survived spills, muddy dog paws, lots of washing and I wouldn't have it any other way!

The absolute best part, is that this was just the tip of the iceberg.  I have done many more quilts since then and have lots, and lots more planned.  I can't wait to show you how it all goes!