I’ve gotten into sewing clothes recently, and, naturally, had to try my hand at quilting as well. To make it easy on myself, I went with two of these gorgeous charm packs by Moda from a collection called “Gyspy Girl.” This quilt is a baby quilt for my blue-eyed Evelyn, and is a perfect size for her crib.
Something about this collection really resonated with me – like the very name suggests, it is so distinctly Russian, making it a perfect choice for this Russian-American (newbie) quilter.
I didn’t use a pattern – just arranged the rows carefully side by side again and again until I settled on the look I liked. Because I prefer things tastefully loud (aka borderline gaudy), I deliberately avoided adding any white space in between the charm pieces.
I pieced half of this quilt together back in the winter, and because of the move and the costumes I was busy making for the first-grade play at my girl’s school, I let the rest be until a few days ago. But once I picked it up again, it only took a couple of hours to stitch together the remaining half and quilt the whole thing on my home machine with wavy lines – something I’d wanted to do for a long time. I used a walking foot with my Viking, and everything went swimmingly.
As far as the quilting lines, I just eye-balled the whole thing without marking the fabric first.
Go ahead and say it – it’s pretty darn good for a beginner who didn’t sew until late November.
I opted to bind the quilt by hand (which means stitching one side of the binding on with the machine, and stitching the other side down with an invisible stitch by hand), using this wonderful tutorial from the endlessly-informative Diary of a Quilter. Although the tutorial is for machine-binding, the process is the same until it comes down to the second side, and I am really grateful to Amy for walking me through a painless way to join the binding together and create those perfect corners. And although people have told me repeatedly that it would take a while, I thought it went extremely fast, especially since my hand-sewing was way advanced already.
Here’s the reverse side – when the fabric is right, I actually prefer the reverse side to the top, especially when it comes to using it for photo props.
In retrospect, I have to say that I found quilting to be great fun, with my favorite parts by far being the fabric selection, the machine-quilting and the hand-binding. I am a little less enamored with piecing everything together.
My next project will involve a Kona Solids Rainbow jelly roll, which I will use to make a twin-sized quilt for my older girl’s bed.
I am also thinking of ordering a layer cake of the same collection as Evelyn’s and doing the extract same thing for my own bed.
Would you say I’m a quick study?
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