Welcome to the World Greyson!

9/14/2012

On Tuesday, I realized that Melissa only had 2.5 weeks until she was due to have her son. I thought - holy cow, I better get a baby blanket made pronto! So I took a look at my fabric stash (budget is a little too tight right now for new designer fabrics) and made a plan. I figured out I had enough fabric for the quilt top and batting, I just needed flannel backing and satin binding. So on Wednesday I went to JoAnn's after work and got the supplies I needed with hopes of making the baby blanket this weekend.

Well, Greyson came early! Of course, I don't know why I didn't start working on the blanket until now - you would think with 9 month's notice I would start these types of projects earlier, LOL! If you want to see pics or updates, check out Mel's blog:

MooreCraziness.Blogspot.com

And here's a few pics of the blanket I made (hopefully she doesn't see before I give it to her tomorrow, haha).

This is actually the first time I've gotten to use my embroidery machine, yay! So far it seems pretty easy to use. The only downside is that it is hard to see exactly where the design is going to start so his name ended up a little off center between the two objects. I didn't have any embroidery thread, just regular cotton thread, but it still came out pretty well! I used some of my normal lightweight adhesive interfacing but I think next time I should use a medium weight and it may not need to be adhesive. You can see the whole blue panel is rippled because the interfacing wasn't stiff enough.

I used a meandering/stipple quilt pattern on the felt blocks but left the white minky with only a wavy border of quilting and almost no quilting in the block. The minky is one of those fabrics that only feels soft and smooth when rubbing it in one direction so sometimes when you quilt on it it doesn't look or feel quite as nice unless you go with the grain. Hopefully it's not too weird that I mixed jungle animals with sharks, LOL.

Normally I would put something on the back that coordinates but since I obviously don't have a consistent theme I just picked the first flannel that looked adorable. ARRRGHH Matey's!

I finished it up with satin binding which is so soft to the touch! I used my walking foot to put the binding on this time so that it would go on nice and smooth and it seemed to help a lot. I even remembered to ad my quilt label on the back. I'm still kind of testing out the best way to place the label - I think it's best when it's right up against the binding but I don't want to end up with the binding covering the label either. I've tried a few different methods and all of them worked ok, now I just need to figure out which one I like best and stick with it.

I used a couple of big pieces of batting I had and stitched them together to try to use up some pieces. I always end up with these big strips and I never know how to decide what pieces of fabric and batting are big enough to save for future projects and what pieces should be discarded. Plus, I feel really bad throwing out all the fabric...any ideas what else I could do with it? Can I put it in the recycling bin or something? At Christmas time I use it for packing material in my boxes but even then I know the recipient throws it out. Hmmm...must search Pinterest for a solution!