Asterisks Baby Quilt

One of my office mates at work was having a baby shower. I do not work with her in the same team but I got a chance to know her over the duration of working on the social committee. We organized a one day event for the office and there were several committees. We were part of social committee. My office mate is full of enthusiasm and mentioned that she sang in her church choir and hence felt at ease in leading the choir for the event.

Well, over the course of planning the event we shared in her pregnancy journey. When an invite was sent out for a baby shower, I decided to make her a baby quilt instead of donating money towards common gifts.

I had completed this  class from Crafty on  block of the month 2012. It was a free class led by Amy Gibson and I really wanted to try this asterisk pattern. She had two different versions and I opted for the non-wonky version for this quilt.

We knew it was going to be a baby boy so I decided to use blue as one of the main colors. The printed fabric had hearts in blue and yellow and so yellow was also added to the mix and white was an obvious choice to match the printed fabric which also ensured that the quilt did not end up to be a maize and blue quilt representing the Michigan Go Blue colors!

 I love how the arms of the asterisk line up when looking from a distance.

 The binding has all the three colors used for making the asterisks and reads "mummy loves me, daddy loves me, God loves me". It takes time to stitch this on the entire border and in the future I might increase the spacing between the words. The extra detail gives a very good personal touch to the finished quilt.

 I used the stitch in the ditch method for quilting and traced out all the straight lines of the asterisks. If I had more time, I might have tried some of the free motion quilting (FMQ) but did not feel confident enough to try that as yet. That is one of my goals to try FMQ on my sewing machine.

 This picture was taken on the balcony of my apartment and shows my potted herb garden collection!

It was a joy to see the expression of my friends face when she opened the package and everyone in the room gasped. It was fun creating this baby quilt - I enjoyed every part of the process of choosing the fabric, piecing and quilting. I forgot to measure the dimensions of the final completed quilt - should do that in the future for my own reference.

Sewing Tools

I bought my Janome sewing machine only this year in January. I will write another post explaining my sewing machine and how and why I decided to buy this particular sewing machine.

When I finally bought the sewing machine, I wanted to begin sewing immediately, that is just my nature to get into the thick of things and begin working. I had been reading up some blog posts about quilting and knew that I wanted to try some quilting before venturing out into sewing garments.

So my first set of tools that I bought included this friskars cutting mat set. The set included an extra large mat, a clear acrylic ruler and a rotary cutter all for a discounted price of $27, originally priced at $55. It seems like the set is still on sale on amazon. Using the cutting mat at first seemed very alien and on reading experiences from other crafters in the community is seems that this is not unusual. I watched a couple of videos and figured out the techniques in using the cutting mat and the acrylic rules and the rotary cutter to cut fabric. All the three items in the set are needed to cut fabric for the purposes of quilting. The rotary cutter slides along the ruler and gives clean edges.I am sure the mat and the rotary cutter could be used for cutting other materials like paper and leather too.

Although I did purchase these friskars scissors too, the rotary cutter is a big step up from using scissors to cut fabric. It totally revolutionizes the process of cutting fabric precisely for purposes of making quilts. The rotary cutter, with its super sharp blade made it extremely easy to cut through nine layers of fabric, something that I had to do my first nine patch quilt. I would exercise extreme caution while using the rotary cutter, so far I have not had any accidents but have read of several mishaps. I use my rotary cutter only for fabrics just so that I do not dull the blades, just like keeping a separate pair of scissors only for fabric.

I love using my cutting mat, the grid lines make it convenient to align fabric correctly and precisely before cutting. Both the surfaces of the cutting mat have grid lines and could be used to cut fabric. I used the cutting mat to iron my pieces once, only to realize that the mat does not behave well with heat. Thankfully the slight warping was not permanent and the board regained its original structure when cooled. Henceforth no heated surfaces come in contact with my board. I also store the board flat so that it does not bend or fold.

I am very pleased with my first purchase, I feel it was money well spent and would recommend this super value for money deal to anyone thinking of doing some serious crafting.

I have a whole list of other quilting tools to buy, like these rulers that would make it so much easier to cut squares. I would love to hear about your experiences using rulers and which are your "must-haves" for quilting.

My first quilt

My first baby quilt also happens to be my second project on my new sewing machine. My first project was a tea cozy that I made to test the features of my powerhouse sewing machine.

I chose a variation of the nine-patch block for my first quilt. Basically you start out with a equal sized nine different fabrics and cut two non-parallel vertical lines followed by another two non-parallel horizontal lines. Each of the nine blocks are then created by taking a different fabric in each of the pieces. This gives rise to nine unique blocks. The video by Jean Nolte and Colleen Tauke of Fons and Porter was the inspiration for this quilt.

I ran into several issues when piecing the quilt. First of all I did not realize that I have a quarter inch seam which made the finished blocks much smaller. Secondly piecing non-square corners was a challenge for a beginner and I ended up having mismatched points which made me change my plan for the remainder of the blocks. I switched to parallel lines for the remainder of the 9X2 blocks. If you notice closely you will see the two types of blocks in the finished quilt.

My sewing machine has inbuilt writing scripts that I used to sew "Mummy Loves Me ~ Daddy Loves Me ~ God Loves Me~" all along the border. This matched the backing fabric that read "I love mommy, I love Daddy".  I love the effect of using this on the red border. For the binding, I used an embroidery design that looked good on both sides, by doing this I skipped the additional step of hand stitching the binding.

I quilted using two different patterns, concentric squares and diamonds, both having straight lines. Towards the end, I realized that I could use the back stitching feature of the sewing machine, which I had done it earlier, it would have saved a lot of tugging and rolling. 




I had not thought of putting a label on the quilt, but after reading some of the quilting, I can see how putting one creates a lasting memory for both the giver and the receiver. I won a giveaway that included many labels, one of  which will be used on this quilt!

I would love to hear your comments on my first quilt. I have begun working on my second piecing, a kaleidoscope quilt. Will write more about it another post.