Poppies In the Rain

What to do on a rainy day?

How about some pinning? :)



Red Poppy is well on it's way but pinning the sandwich is always such a tedious step - especially when doing more defined applique since you want to make sure that the quilt sandwich is COMPLETELY smoothed out and it stays that way.

When all the pinning is complete - roll it up and hopefully I'll get around to quilting it very soon...

Borders and Scripes Ready for Quilting

A quick cleanup of my rug and the Borders and Stripes quilt is back on it for the quilt backing and basting.  Maybe I was not in the mood or I got used to putting together the baby quilts but this turned out to be quite a lot more work than I expected.

But after what seemed like forever I finally got the quilt bottom in place with the batting and quilt top.  Here's a glimpse of it as I was unrolling the batting and quilt top onto the quilt backing.


Whee! I thought I'll never finish this process!

After I got the whole quilt assembled and ready for the pinning I realize that the edge of the quilt was quilt uneven.  I guess I was pretty careless while measuring out the width of the quilt since it was all horizontal stripes.  No matter, it could all be trimmed away without causing any difference in the design of the quilt  - since it was all horizontal stripes after all.

But I never feel comfortable about cutting away at the extra material around the quilt until after quilting - well unless there's an excessive about of material which was not the case here.  So I decided I'll outline where I want the quilting to top and where I would eventually trim, with some quilter's tape.

Here's a closeup of the tape work I did to make sure I know where to trim later.

Some spots barely need any trimming, but others like the area pictured here needs about 1-3 inches of trimming.

Why am I taking the time to do this?  Well I'm planning to quilt some decorative lines into the quilt and I want to make sure that I don't cut into my hand quilting area.  As you may already know, hand sewing/quilting is not forgiving when it comes to cutting.  You DO NOT want to cut into the middle of any hand-sewn stitching as it will cause the stitch line to unravel.

Well the quilt is all pinned and ready for quilting.  I'll put that off till next week :P.

A Whole Lot of Baby Quilt Pinning

Today was an evening of quilt sandwich assembling and basting.  That pins out with the safety pins.  What's being pinned?  The 2 quilts I'm making for my boys.

So out with the safety pins and pins:

I didn't get all the safety pins in the picture before I pinned...arg.  But the blue container on the left is usually about half full with safety pins.

First Asher's quilt:


Then Silas':


I absolutely adore these 2 panels - they each feature objects that my sons love the most: robots, balloons, cars, books, bikes, and the outdoors.  What more can a kid ask for? :P

The 2 quilts are rolled up and ready for the quilting machine.

Hopefully I get to it next week.

Assembling the Borders and Stripes Quilt Sandwich

After the quilt top was pieced together - over 2 weeks ago - I got around to starting the quilt sandwich.  The prep work took a while to finished.  My house is pretty small and the biggest area in it happens to be the main living area - aka play area, tv watching area, family hanging out area, ironing area, etc etc.  Well after about 20 minutes of picking up, vacuuming and organizing I finally got my quilt sandwich going.

Here is the quilt top with just the batting in place:


As usual - the batting of choice:

I'm still going through my giant queen size roll of this batting. Love it!

And do you know what happens after a mom gets about 1 hour of alone time in?

This:

AKA: The trouble-makers!

Oh well, the rest of the assembling will have to wait ... arg I JUST finished clearing up the living room floor!  I love those two little rug-rats :).

Modded Brown Chugs Along

Wow, it's been almost a month since I had a chance to work on this quilt:

This was as far as I went last time - putting the quilt top with the batting. I rolled it up and it's been sitting in my living room for almost a month.  Today I get to roll it out and make some progress...finally!

But a couple of hours of quality time and now this quilt is ready for the quilting machine - well my sewing machine with a quilting leg attachment (Juki TL-98Q).  Close enough right?  Gets the job done :).

I did the first part of the quilt sandwich last month so this time it was just the matter of finishing it up with the quilt backing.

This is all 3 layers place together and smoothed out - quilt top, batting, quilt back - all ready for basting.

Takes up most of my living room rug.  I like to (whenever possible) assemble the quilt on the rug because it's just more comfortable to work on than the hardware floor. The rug isn't on of those ultra plush rugs so there's no much give to wrinkle up the fabrics.

A closeup of the quilt sandwich:

This stage is always so scary to me - it's when all the pieces come together and you get to see if all your measuring, cutting and sewing was done correctly.  Luckily, this one was :) - all the pieces lining up just fine.

After every each of the quilt sandwich was smoothed out it is time for the safety pins to come out again.  I use a lot of pins.  I start from one end of the quilt and make my one to the other end.  For the edges I pin about 2-3 inches apart, for the interior I pin about 4-6 inches apart.

Pins, Pins, Pins:

I love the look of a neatly pinned quilt.  Here is a closeup of the pins - notice the ones on the edges are closer together than the ones in the interior.  

The quilt is now ready for some quilting.  I'm going to be doing a freestyle motion quilting.  Hopefully I could schedule this into my next week's goals.

Extended Checkered Has Started

One of my Spring goals is to complete this Extended Checkered quilt. It's a basic rectangle blocked quilt top using two different colors in the center and binding. I don't have anyone in mind for this quilt either.  But I really wanted to use the blue print fabric I had.  I didn't have much of it, a little over a yard, and the print was very nice.  I wanted to create simple that would showcase the fabric.

The quilt top design:

Keeping it simple to showcase the fabrics.  

The quilt backing.  I used a white Muslim 100% cotton fabric for the majority of the backing.  I used a little bit of the quilt front fabric for the backing.

Keeping the back of the quilt simple also.  I ran out of the blue fabric so I tried to use what was left of it for the back - not much left :).

I pieced together the quilt top and bottom a couple of days ago.  It is all ironed and ready for the basting.  I used Warm & Natural 100% cotton batting.  The quilt is about 53"x73" so I had to clear out my entire living room floor to make room.  Lay the batting on flat on the floor - enough for the quilt top and then some.  Then put the quilt top on top of the batting and SMOOTH SMOOTH SMOOTH.  Make sure you smooth from the middle out to all the edges.  This takes a bit of time, but it's a very important step. 

Pictures is the smoothing process.  As you could see here, it's not enough to just put the quilt top on the batting.  If you don't take the time to smooth out this process, you're going to have a lot of tugging during the quilting process.  As you could see here there's still a lot of bumps to smooth out.

Once again I'm out of time for my projects.  This is a good stopping point because the smoothed out batting and quilting top needs to be rolled up anyways.  It'll be rolled up and ready to put the quilt backing on next time I have time to work on this - again I need to clear out my living room floor again :).

Modded Brown Continues - Quilt Sandwich

Time to break out the roll of batting and start sandwiching.  For most of my quilts I like to use Warm & Natural 100% cotton batting.  I brought a huge roll a while back and have been chipping away at it.

A few housekeeping task - clear out the rug area (the largest open space I have in my home right now), occupy the kids with other activities or put them down for a nap (you don't want kids to be running around while doing this task - for starters it takes up the whole living room!), and drag out the huge roll of batting.

I put the batting roll on one end of the room and start rolling it out to the other.  Make sure that there is enough batting for the size, 48"x67" in this case.  Make sure there is plenty enough extra batting on all size of the quilt.  I usually leave about 3 inches on each side.  The batting should be smoothed out completely before putting on the quilt top.

 

The roll of Warm and Natural spread out and ready for sandwiching.  In this picture I didn't smooth out the batting yet - so make sure you do so before putting on the quilt top!

After the batting is smoothed I lay the quilt top on the batting - make sure to leave around 3" of batting on all sides.  When the quilt top is placed in a good spot - SMOOTH SMOOTH SMOOTH down both the layers.  This is very important - making sure that there is enough batting on ALL sides of the quilt top and make sure that there is an even, flat contact between the quilt sandwich and batting.

When I know that the batting and quilt down is as flat as possible I cut around the quilt top, leaving about 3" of batting on all sides.  The quilt top and batting sandwich is now ready for the quilt backing.

The kids were waking up at this point so I needed to give up my open space.  What I do when I don't have time to finish the quilt sandwich is to roll up the quilt top and batting sandwich together into a log to be used later.
Here's a picture of the quilt top and batting sandwich being rolled up.

I roll about a foot deep along the short side of the sandwich.  Keep rolling until the whole sandwich is nicely tucked into this roll.  

Once the sandwich is rolled up, it could be stored away safely until I am ready to assemble it with the quilt backing.  Hopefully this is sooner than later :P!