My first quilt

My very first quilt is now at it’s permanent home with a new baby!  My closest friend from high school was blessed with a second child and I really wanted to do something special since this was a particularly difficult pregnancy.  I “cheated” a little…I bought a kit for the Baby Buggies pattern from Clothworks.  I just didn’t feel comfortable working with a pattern for which I would have to choose the fabric.  No confidence in that yet!

In fact, I had to “cheat” on this quilt a lot!  Despite the use of a good ruler and a rotary cutter my pieced squares turned out a little off from the measurements.  I’m not sure if this was due to my ineptitude at cutting or my ineptitude at sewing a quarter inch seam (despite having a handy dandy quarter inch foot) or both.  When it came to sewing the larger squares together, I sometimes had to fudge the seam a bit to get it to work.  In retrospect, I probably should have squared up all of the larger pieces to the same size then sewed them together but it eventually worked out.  I did have to trim the main quilt a bit before adding the striped edging but overall it wasn’t too bad.

I thought I had a brilliant idea with the binding after reading how to avoid sewing it by hand.  You simply sew the binding to the back then fold over and use a decorative stitch that shows on the front.  Voila!  Or in my case not so Voila!  Now that I’ve done it once I realize at least as a beginner the hand sewn finishing would have created a much neater edge.  Instead I ended up with one that was quite wobbly.

The actual quilting was an adventure too.  Another “brilliant” idea I had was to try to use the embroidery machine to quilt a block after the entire quilt was sandwiched together.  Embroidery machines come with quilt like patterns so this must be what they are used for?  I don’t think so.  Trying to put the whole quilt in there was just so unwieldy.  I think it must be used for quilting much smaller projects or individual squares.  Fortunately my machine has quite a few quilting stitches, one of which was a wide squiggly pattern I seem to see on at lot of quilts.  I switched to that and just randomly went over the rest of the pain squares.  At any rate, I learned a lot and it is still precious since it was my first one.

I’d love to hear any advice or tips from quilters!  I enjoyed it so much I’m definitely planning more projects just as soon as I can figure out how to get better results.