my first quilt


2 years ago [god i'm a bad mom]- when orange was her favorite color [we've since moved onto pink, purple, and my favorite "all the colors"] i had the little pick out some fabric. she chose the above cloud nine - and held it all the way home. 

i told her i would make her something. what did she want? a skirt? a dress? a bag? mama, i want a blanket. 

gulp. 


i made a quilt with my mom, once, as a pre-teen? quilt? oh boy. but you can't say no to that kind of request. so i told her she'd have to be patient, and she was... [i remind you TWO YEARS!]. 

i thought it'd be really fun to make squares and enlarge the funny monster characters - and the white circles/ovals they lived on. there were 6 characters. so that made it easy. i'd make six squares and use the fabric as the backing. i only bought 2 yards of fabric, so it was going to have to be slightly smaller than a twin in size, but that seemed fine [and made my task easier].


initially i was going to quilt the circles INTO the orange background, but i quickly realized that was beyond my skillset, so i appliqued them instead [machine zig zag stitch]. i also arranged the circles/characters in slightly different positions. once the embroidery was complete i started laying out the squares to see compositionally what worked. 


because it was my first quilt, i didn't want to do any CRAZY quilting. so concentric rectangles it was. i just measured them out. 


i used orange gingham i had in my stash for the binding [JEEZ i found the binding part REALLY HARD!!]. i machine stitched everything. 1 - because it's faster and 2 - because i figured this blanket would probably get washed a lot, and potentially dragged around and i didn't want to have to repair hand stitching repeatedly. 


i want to give a HUGE shout out to erin - if it wasn't for her book i would have had no idea how to sandwich correctly or how to even begin to tackle binding. i wrote about her book here... and it really is such an amazing resource. 

i also now see why people get into this whole quilting thing. i really do. [but i doubt i'll ever be a master]

Comments

Katy said…
That's gorgeous! I did something similar, but I decided to hand sew the entire thing! We're heading up to 4 years and I'm about to finish the pieced back (why? why did I think that was a good idea?). It would probably help if I worked on it a little though!

I hope there are many years of snuggles to come under that lovely quilt!
Anonymous said…
WOW, how cute! The little's patience paid off, eh?!?
I LOVE it! It was such a cute and smart idea to embroider those critters. I bet F. loves it, too! Good job, Lisa!
wendy said…
this is brilliant (you can say you wanted to make a lap quilt!) love everything about it!
Kathryn said…
Yay! There's just something so gratifying about completing a quilt. So nice that the little one loves it too!
melissa s. said…
I love it. Anything made with love is a masterpiece in my book ;-)

I really like how the square quilting looks a little log cabin-ish, too.

xo

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