Easy toy quilt tutorial

Okay, calling this thing a quilt is a stretch. Or possibly an insult to quilters everywhere. But! It does make a fantastic baby toy. I whipped this up in a hurry one day when I was in need of quiet baby toys. Olive's got a thing for scrunching up textiles. (hooray!) My goal with this was to make something with a variety of textures for her to enjoy.

Here's what you need:

• 3 - 4.5" x 12" (11.4 cm x 30.4 cm) pieces of cotton


• 1 - 12" x 12" (30.4 cm x 30.4 cm) piece of fabric for the back (I used a cheap, silky one...the better for scrunching.)


• 4 - 4" x 12" (10 cm x 30.4 cm) pieces of fleece (Please ignore the obviously 14" long pieces in the photo. I was going to try something else, which wound up not working. IGNORE!)

Step 1- Sew together the cotton
Placing the right sides together, sew the long sides of two pieces together.

Connect the third piece in the same way. You'll wind up with something like this:

Press the seams open in the back:


Step 2 - Assembly
Pin the back fabric to the front, wrong sides together. Lay one of the fleece pieces underneath at the top, and fold about half of it over like so:


Pin into place, and sew the bottom edge. Repeat this process with the opposite edge:

Place another piece of fleece on one of the open sides, making sure to overlap the already sewn on fleece. Pin, and sew as you did the last two. Add the final fleece piece in the same way. (Yes, I could have been typing "binding" all this time, but you have to admit "fleece piece" is much more enjoyable to say. Try it.)
Using a 1/2" seam allowance, sew around the outside edge of the quilt:

Trim the threads, and baby, you are done!

Notes:

• This is totally machine washable. And dryable. Unless you use some fancypants fabric that is not, alas, machine washable.


• I wish I had spent a little more time on this project, honestly. The tiny format would be perfect for trying out new patterns.

The Hex

Hello, dear readers. You may recall a post, not so very long ago, where I attempted to quilt. So frustrating was the process that I vowed never to quilt again. Ever. Never, ever.
I did finish that one quilt, though. It sits on our bed right now, and it is rather awesome. I love how it looks, all imperfect and handmade and cozy. Olive loves it, too. She scrunches it up and studies the patterns. It buys me up to an extra half hour of sleep most mornings.
Clearly, quilts are fantastic. I am now a convert.
A friend made an amazing hexagon quilt for Olive. It's hand finished and utterly perfect and lovely. I've been staring at it hanging on her crib for far too long. It started to look doable. I stared to visualize a nap sized quilt for Olive and I to read under. She could drape it over chairs to make forts. It would be handmade and cozy and lovely.
Thus, I began working on the Hexagon Hell quilt in early June.
I had a vast array of pink fabrics gathering on the shelf, begging for a project to be part of. I wanted great big hexagons. I went with a 5" size, because that was the largest one my ruler would make. I also wanted to make an embroidered centerpiece. I had recently finished designing the Bunnies in the Kitchen embroidery patterns, and I wanted to try them out. I figured they'd be perfect for this.
The cutting progressed perfect and uneventfully. Man, I love cutting fabric. With the first quilt I made, I started with a charm pack that turned out to be...less than square. I only found this out once all the "squares" were sewn together and the strips would. Not. Line. Up. I was determined to not have the same problem happen twice. (See The Quiltening part 1) I bought a special plastic cutting guide, and I very, very carefully cut each piece. The initial phase went so well that I pretty much failed to document it. "Wow! This is going perfectly. I don't think I'll get a blog post out of this at all. Wheee!"

Before too long, I had lovely stacks. I laid them out in a pleasing arrangement, pinned post its in place to guide the assembly, and got crackin'.
Super careful assembly of the long strips began. Seam guides were used. Seams pressed open. Blah blah blah.
And then.
And THEN.
I had 11 perfect rows. I was rarin' to attach them to each other. I laid the first two out and...
Drew a total blank.
How the heck do these things fit together?
I couldn't figure it out, but I found a helpful tutorial that made it click. The stitching commenced.
AND THEN.
The hexagons simply would not line up properly. I watched the video again. I ripped the seam again. I watched the video several more times. I ripped the same darn seam many, many more times.
This is where the fit of pique happened.
The sounds of angry grunting and frustrated whining brought by husband into the room.
"Why won't they line up? WHY?!?! I was so careful!"
"Hmmm...why are they so much longer on one side?"
"They're not! They can't possibly be! I used a RULER!"
I felt like such a failure. How could I have made the same mistake again? I threw in the towel for the night. But every time I closed my eyes, I saw hexagons. Gahhhh.
Throwing the towel (er, quilt top) away was not an option. Not that I ever give up that easily. (If my mom is reading this, she just said "HA!") I had used up a bunch of my favorite hoarded fabrics. Laurie Wisbrun lambs were in there! And a bunch of Japanese imports from Superbuzzy that I bought when I was pregnant with Olive. The quilt must go on.
However, it soon became apparent that doing things the "right" way wasn't going to work for me, either. I realized again that I simply do not have a straight line in me. Trying to force perfect geometric shapes out of me was making me crazy. I have such limited time to create things these days. Picking a painful project just seemed insane.
I couldn't stop thinking about those darn things. I kept rearranging them in my mind, and coming up with other ways to salvage the quilt. I even dreamed of a really fantastic quilt that night.
I had a small window of time the next day to try out some of my ideas. I stumbled upon something that worked for me. Real quilters will probably want to puke when they hear it, but I think we've established that I am not a real quilter.
I simply laid both strips right side up, and folded the second strip on top of the first. I then sewed on top of the folded hexagon. Boom. Done. It worked! I no longer felt like a looser. Nay, I was a sewing wunderkind!
I'm really pleased with the effect. The rows are layered almost like roof tiles. It makes me think of Necco wafers tiled on a gingerbread roof.
For the backing, I happened to have snagged some cute vintage-y green rosebuds at the local thrift store. A couple of seams later, and that was done.
Now, the basting. Man, was I dreading the basting. The last time I quilted, the basting went on forever. Thread and needle. Hands and knees. Pregnant lady on the ground. Fun stuff. This time, however, I took my mother-in-law's advice: I bought a basting gun. That lady knows her stuff.
Boom, boom, boom, click click click, and 20 minutes later, I was done. A revelation! One does not have to suffer to baste! Sure, this makes for a less interesting blog post, but it also makes for a FINISHED QUILT. And less pain.
Okay, now comes the part I was really, really dreading. (If I dread so many parts of this process, why was I doing it? This is a question that I asked myself a lot during the making, and one I still have no answer for.) THE ACTUAL QUILTING. I decided to bite the bullet and try to quilt it on my machine.
And...it went fine. More than fine, actually. It was so easy, and so fast. I really wish I had attempted to machine finish the last quilt.
Can I confess something to you? I actually like making binding. I spent a blissful couple of hours while the baby napped ironing. IRONING! And listing to the Judge John Hodgman podcast. It was perfect.
And thus, the quilt was finished. I actually finished it on July 17th. Not bad!
Here's the finished quilt:



And here's the embroidered centerpiece:

I LOVE how it turned out.

Okay, who's ready for a nap?

The Quiltening 3 - This Time It's Personal

In case you missed it, here's part one and part two of The Quilting. It's an epic saga of thread and fabric and rib pain.

All caught up? Okay, let's go.

Apparently, it's not just enough to make the fancy, painstaking quilt top, and then baste it together by hand. Oh, no. You then need to sew all the layers together. This is apparently what quilting really is. I had considered doing this with my sewing machine. I love my little Elna, but after the ordeal that was stitching the top strips together, I decided we both weren't up for it. There was also the not insignificant detail of the squares not lining up. How exactly was I going to stitch all this together?
The answer came from an unlikely source: Alicia Paulson's new book, the Embroidery Companion. One of the projects is a darling wall quilt. She quilted the layers together with a simple straight embroidery stitch. It looked charming. I could do that!
Because the quilt was so large, I decided to embroider only the white squares and hope for the best. And so it began.

If you've never embroidered on something so bloody huge, let me tell you what it's like. You stretch the rolled up quilt over the couch lengthwise, and you try to keep various animals from jumping on it and ripping out the basted stitches. Of course you are doing this on the couch. Are you telling me you don't want to watch reruns while you do this? Then, you need to hold the area you're working on very taut, because you don't have a quilting hoop. After you're done with one square, you need to push the quilt down the couch to begin working on the next. And so on. And so on. Until you die. Er, get very hot and needle callused and decide that you've had enough for one night.
It's not all bad. First of all, you get to watch tv while you're doing this. But since you're making something, it's totally not wasted time. Tv without guilt! Secondly, the needle slides in and out of the layers of fabric with a really satisfying, albeit almost inaudible pop. Thirdly, it really is delightful sewing by hand. And if it was winter, you'd be snuggly warm.
(Of course, I was doing this in early fall, which is still pretty warm around here.)

I finally finished the hand quilting segment of this project on October 20th. Mark it on your calendars! The day the hand quilting was at last vanquished completed. Remember how I said I thought I was done with the rib pain portion of this project when the basting was done. BOY. WAS I EVER WRONG. The slight hunch forward required to do this turned out to be excruciatingly painful. Hence this part taking weeks. Hence the celebration when the hand quilting was finished.

[caption id="attachment_2299" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Sewing on the binding"][/caption]

Next came the trimming of the edges (a cinch), and the pulling out of the basted stitches (also a cinch). The final step was sewing on binding tape to finish up the edges. This was easy, and you know me and straight lines. Maybe everything just seems easy now in comparison to every other step of this project. Some final trims of sticking out threads, and boom! I was DONE.

Really DONE!

[caption id="attachment_2295" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="There, now it's complete."][/caption]

As in MISSION QUILT COMPLETED!

[caption id="attachment_2293" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="The quilt works! It makes pugs sleepy."][/caption]

This was by far the biggest, most complicated, longest, most rib-hurtingest project I have ever tackled. I started this project on Sept. 9th. I finally finished it on November 5th. That's 57 days. (Of course, I didn't work on it every single day.)
I'm proud of myself for actually finishing this difficult, not always fun project. I'm amazed that I was able to make something practical (and pretty cute!) for our home.
However, I don't think I'll be diving into a project this large again ever. Or, at the very least, not until the memory of how hard this as fades. I think it's time to make a potholder or something.

The Quiltening - Part Two

So there I was. A 90" x 100" quilt top draped across my sewing machine. Dogs and bunnies ran underneath the side that hung down off the table. The quilt top was...done. Now what? How do you go from this to a cozy blanket?
My local-ish library to the rescue, of course. I checked out The Quilter's Catalog by Meg Cox. (It was the best of the slim pickings available. However, if you're looking for a book on basket weaving or gourd carving, the Folsom library has got millions for you to choose from.)

According to the book, I needed to make a "quilt sandwich". This means spreading out the backing, the batting, and finally the top, and then basting them all together. Preferably on a wood floor or other hard surface, so you can tape them down. I can see how that would be the best thing to do, but all I've got is carpet. I cleared as much of the studio floor as I could, and set about carefully spreading out the layers of fabric. This proved to be tricky for a number of reasons, not the least of which was my constant helper pugs, who insisted on being RIGHT THERE the whole time. In the end, all I could do was hope that the layers were smoothed out enough. There was no way to tell what was going on in the back layer, but the top looked great.

So: basting. Basting basting basting. Baseterds. For those who have never been through this before, basting is temporarily stitching fabric together, generally in large stitches so they can be easily removed.
Picture if you will a pregnant woman on her hands and knees, shuffling around the floor with a giant needle and orange thread, occasionally kicking in the direction of the pugs who keep wandering onto the giant quilt. Every so often, she has to stop and whine about rib pain. This activity is not helping the constant rib pain.
In fact, if I have one complaint about the second trimester, it's this: RIB PAIN. RIB PAAAAIIIIN. My left rib hurts, constantly. Have I mentioned that enough yet?

Okay, onward. Many hours later, the basting was complete! I even managed to NOT baste the quilt to the carpet. Hooray! No more crawling on the ground! My ribs would get a break! Now what?

Find out in part three of The Quiltening - This Time It's Personal.

*And why yes, these photos WERE taken out of sequence! How keen of you to notice. Seems that I managed to forget to photograph the whole basting part of the process. Oops.

*Oh! And in case you missed it, here's part one of this craftastrophe: What, Me Quilting?