Last weekend on St. Patrick's day, while we were buying a boat...our good friends Josh & Carolyn were having a baby! Everything went very well and mommy and baby were tired but healthy and happy. We delayed visiting to try to make it as easy as possible on the new family.
As usual...I was a little late on making her baby gift so delaying the visit worked out perfectly. I might have posted this a bit ago but here's the cute onesie I made for Makayla (both her parents ran cross country at Florida Tech and Josh is an assistant cross country and track coach at Florida Tech still.
As usual...I was a little late on making her baby gift so delaying the visit worked out perfectly. I might have posted this a bit ago but here's the cute onesie I made for Makayla (both her parents ran cross country at Florida Tech and Josh is an assistant cross country and track coach at Florida Tech still.
But the more important part of their gift was a baby quilt. The nursery is a beach and sea theme so I wanted to do an under the sea theme with aqua and coral. I think the top came out really cute but I did want to make the "M" a little bigger to sprawl across the sections.
The fabric colors were also a tiny bit more muted than I expected but it worked out better than I thought it would when it was all done. If you read my posts about the sewing expo then you know that I got to do some neat practicing on the fancy longarm quilting machines and have been anxiously awaiting an opportunity to try out the skills I learned on my quilting machine. I decided to free-hand stitch (IE don't draw it or use a template or stencil) a different design in each section and to make the stitching nautical themed as well. Originally I was going to use CAD to make my own pantographs but I ran out of time so that's when I thought "eh...I'll just wing it'. Anyone who gets a gift from me knows (or should know) that they are likely to get an experiment where I was trying something new.
Around the "M" I did a basic echo quilting (where you outline the stitching, sometimes multiple times, like ripples or echos).
Around the "M" I did a basic echo quilting (where you outline the stitching, sometimes multiple times, like ripples or echos).
For the horizontal strips, I wanted it to be kind of like what you might find in the ocean. So the top layer had waves
For the second row I did anchors with a chain between them. These were one area where a new machine would really help - mine has a hard time stitching in the diagonal so you can see a few areas where the stitching kind of jerks off of where it should be.
In the next row, I did some spinning starfish
In the fourth row I did some coral. Here's a shot before I did the echo quilting and then another after so you can see what the design looks like before and after.
The coral would be growing from the ocean floor (see where we're going here?) so on the bottom row I did pebbles (should look like pebbles), they are touching circles of varying sizes.
Since I did the pebbles over the fabric that already has circles on, it's a little hard to see them. So here is a view of the back of the circles so you can see the stitching more clearly
Last but not least, I needed to quilt the vertical strip. But there was one problem - i wanted all vertical stitching and my quilt machine only moves horizontally. I know what most quilters do but I've been too chicken to do it. Finally I sucked it up and figured it out...I took the quilt off the rack, rotated 90 degrees and used my bungees to hold it on the frame the direction I wanted.
For the vertical section, I just wanted something flowy - almost like the tiny bubbles you see floating to the surface (and something to add interest to the quilting).
Finally here's the quilt front, back and all rolled up ready to go.
I had some under the sea fabric left over so what better way to use it than to make a couple of personalized burp cloths!
Welcome to the world little Makayla!!
