Crib Quilt Progress

Wow – I had no clue I hadn’t posted this! This was written on 12/27/08.

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I finished the top of the crib quilt yesterday, and pieced the backing together.

Pieced, ready for quilting

Now all I have to do is figure out what sort of quilting I want to do on it. I was considering just a basic cross-hatch, but I’d really like to do something a little more complex. For the border, I’ve come up with a simple pattern of “braided” wavy lines; but because of the pattern of squares and number of rows being irregular, I’m having difficulty with the body.

BTW, I had to figure out for myself (with huge amounts of help from Brian) how to do the half-rectangles. The website that I’d found was *WRONG*! Guess that’s what I get for believing what I read on the internets ;-} Fortunately, I had extra material that I could play around with. I’m going to write up the method I used (probably isn’t the only way, but it works without having to have any special rulers). The only thing is, because I used batiks, there was no right-side/wrong-side issue with the fabrics. I will have to experiment with some one-sided fabric to make sure I cover both types of fabric; and also the orientation aspect (which direction the angle goes).

So I’m off to go searching through my quilting books to see if I can decide on a quilting pattern for the body – if not, I may actually have to drag out a pencil and see if I can draw something I like (and believe me, drawing freehand is not one of my talents. . .).

Starting out

I’ll start with my current projects, the first one of which is a quilt.

The quilt is a crib-quilt for a niece’s baby due in December, and is my own design. It’s very simple, 4-patch diagonals interspersed with diagonals of single blocks, using some rich batik fabrics I picked up from The Quilt House in Gardnerville, NV on vacation this August. It really goes very quickly, and in spite of some fears that I wasn’t going to have enough of a couple fabrics (I mailed swatches to The Quilt House, and bought some extra of each, although now I think I won’t need it, so there’s some for my stash), I surprised myself by having done a good job of estimating what I needed. On a couple fabrics, I liked them so much I bought extra for my stash.

Quilt on design wall - cut but not sewn yet

My only tools for the design process were pencil and paper, a yardstick, and the calculator on my cell phone – although we do have running water and an indoor toilet (at least for two-thirds of the year), and electricity and a phone, there’s no computer (horrors! what does a techno-junkie like me do for a 10 days without a computer?!?). I plotted out the basic design, calculated the amount of fabric needed, and had a generic idea about colors I wanted to use (a rough approximation of ROYGBIV), using batik fabrics. We drove into town, and I selected the fabrics, but because there wasn’t anything I could really do with them at that point

(and because I was working on a knitted baby afghan for another niece’s baby),

they got stashed in my suitcase, and I didn’t pull them out until the second week in October. I’m in the midst of my radiation treatments, so with an appointment every weekday morning, and working full time, I haven’t had a lot of time to work on it. My friend and neighbor Sharon, who took the same first quilting class with me (and hasn’t looked back since – she is a quilting fiend!), came over to look over my cutting plan, and to help me figure out one tricky little half-rectangle cutting/sewing problem. I have a book, “The Joy of Quilting” that shows you how to do half-rectangles, but only using a Bi-rangle, and the same two fabrics – and doesn’t include any information on how to do it without the special tool – I finally found some directions online for cutting half-rectangle blocks down to size, rather than being able to cut them like half-squares and just sew them together – argh!

So I’ve been sewing the center block strips, but now I have to put everything away for our annual Games Party that is coming up this Saturday night.

I believe that I will have this done in plenty of time, so that it is actually done before the baby is born (that’ll be a first for me ;-} ).

I’m thinking about what I want to do for quilting though. Stitch-in-the-ditch would be the easiest, but I’d really like to have some sort of pattern, at least on the border, if not elsewhere. Hmmm.

Next up is the loomwork bracelet that is facing a new life as a choker. . .