the toki cafe: Makes * A quilt for Henry

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Makes * A quilt for Henry

So while I was away from this blog, my sister and brother-in-law made me a new nephew! And he is CUTE. I just want to cuddle him all day long. For christmas, I decided to make him a quilt but I wanted to kick it up a notch. Lucky me, Rachel over at Stitched in Color was running a penny patch quilt-a-long. Perfect! This totally looks doable and fancier than my usual quilts. I highly recommend this for anyone who wants to give quilting a try. Rachel does a fantastic job of breaking down the process and walking you gently through it all. I don't really have work in progress photos because I whipped this baby up in record time but I'll share the few photos that I did take.

My fabric choices were all based on a super cute woodland animal print. Using the colors found in that print, I selected a bunch of fabrics with smaller patterns. I had to add in a handful of solids when I realized that I didn't have enough different fabrics to make this design work. I would have liked to go easier on all the darker colors but I'm a practical sort of gal and this quilt will have all kinds of things spilled onto it in its lifetime so I figured darker fabrics will hide stains better.

Lots of arranging and rearranging. It's easier for my eyes to catch patterns in photos rather than in real life. I'd arrange, take a photo, then rearrange. It helps me to more evenly space out colors and patterns. I have about twenty of these photos.

This is my "I rolled out of bed and straight to my sewing machine look. This is the step that makes my arms sore. I learned that rolling up the quilt helps with the "Where do I put the $%*^ the parts of the quilt that I'm not sewing??" dilemma. But the quilt does get heavy and even with a walking foot, my hands are super tense as I feed the quilt through the machine.