One of my New Year’s resolutions is to finally get into quilting. I have to tried to make them, but I get bored so easily it never really works out. Sewing cute little dresses makes me happier because they are so small and girly and I picture my sweet nieces in them. Quilts just strike me as kind of… blah. The fact that they have to be so precise does not help the cause. When sewing garments, it is easy to hide a little cutting snafu, but in a quilt, one wrong snip and you have to start over whatever piece you were putting together.
However, I am changing that this year. I will learn to quilt and I will like it even if it kills me. I think it is an ideal way to get rid of my piles of fabric scraps and will hopefully make a dent on my fabric hoard. My great grandmother and great aunt made beautiful Cathedral style quilts. I wish when that great aunt was teaching me to sew she would have taught me how to make those too. She made one for me when she learned that I was being named after her and it is my most prized possession.
I have heard Cathedral quilts are really difficult to make, so I am starting small and easy. My quilt challenge is to make a quilt for all my little friends: Weston, Payton, Bella, Kate, Kami, Jackson, Charlie, and Caroline. I have a rough idea of what I want to make for each quilt, but keep searching Pinterest for other ideas.
Over my Christmas/New Year break from work, I started on a quilt for Bella. It is a simple chevron pattern I found here and was made from squares instead of triangles. I made hers in a rainbow motif, and it was really cute. To actually quilt the blanket, you have to buy a special foot for your sewing machine. I bought a Brother quilting foot on Amazon that arrived on New Year’s Eve. It apparently pulls your fabric from the top and the bottom so that it quilts evenly. It is so weird to sew with; it just pulls left and right and basically goes wherever your hands do. I wondered why all the ladies were wearing gloves in the pictures I saw on the internet of people quilting, and now I know. It will take me seven years to quilt this tiny quilt, and the quilting is mediocre at best. A lady at Sew Bee It had made a similar quilt and told me how to do these “simple but ornate” quilting stitches on it. Yeah… that is not happening anytime soon. It takes all I have to keep my stitches in the ditch; let’s not get crazy here or anything.
Here is a picture of her quilt top. I will post another one once it is completely finished.
Do you sew quilts? How do you find the patience for it? How do you decide the design for your quilts? Which foot do you use when it’s time to quilt your finished quilt?
