First New Baby Quilt of 2012

One of the babies I made a quilt for in the past has a new baby brother, so I got busy yesterday.  This is the top chain pieced in rows across.  Next I will sew all the rows together.  Follow this link to some older posts about this Kaffe Fassett African Stripe Baby Quilt pattern. I'll update through the day to report my progress.

Update: 15 January 11:43am

Only five rows to go and the blocks will be all pieced together.

Kaffe Fassett's African Baby Stripe quilt: A new version of an old favorite

The fabrics for tiny baby Flora's quilt are pre-washed and ready to be cut out.  There's a lovely, soft flannel for the back with pink, blue, and leaf green flowers, two kinds of polka dots for the borders, and nine striped fabrics for the body.  I'll also bind it with a striped fabric.  By this time, I have made more than twenty of these African Striped Baby Quilts using Kaffe Fassett's pattern (with a little tweaking on my part) and it's the random nature of the pattern that most appeals to me.  I never get tired of making them because each one is so unique.

The body is laid out on my work table and ready to be chain pieced.  You can see this old post for more detailed information.

Second generation baby quilt: A First for Me

This incredibly cute little guy is Abbott and I am making him a baby quilt.  The really amazing thing about this is that one of the first baby quilts I ever made was for his mother, Molly.  This will be my first second generation baby quilt!

This is the wonderful Kaffe Fassett's African Stripe Baby Quilt pattern that I'm doing again.  It's so colorful and scrappy.  The Winnie the Pooh fabric will be the back.  The plaid will be used for binding and the shamrock and blue circle fabric will be the borders.

The pattern calls for nine different stripes.  This is the front all laid out and ready for me to chain piece.  You can read about the construction of this quilt here, here, and here.  Quilted Librarian is back to work in Safety Pin Studio.

Another baby quilt

I spent some of the weekend working on both the One Million Books quilt (all titles now are written on the border strips) and cutting out a new Kaffe Fassett African stripe baby quilt.



Baby jungle animals for the back, polka dots for the border, and plaid fabric for the bias tape. I'm chain piecing and have about three rows completed. More pictures soon. I've posted about making this quilt pattern before. These are the posts on chain piecing, adding borders, pin basting, quilting, and adding bias binding.

"In the Pink": Quilting with the Girl Scouts

Image from Girl Scouts of the United States of America

Thanks to some great online resources, I have worked up three samples and gathered the materials for the first of my sessions with the Girl Scouts this week. They are working on a "journey" (badge from the old days) called "In the Pink" in which they educate themselves about the causes, detection, treatment, and prevention of breast cancer. They will all have gone to an information session before I see them where they will learn (among lots of other things) that the founder of the Girl Scouts, Juliette Gordon Low, died of breast cancer in 1927. She is the inspiration for the quilt we are going to create.

I'm planning on showing them Susie Shie's work to spur their creativity. I'm hoping we can do a drawing of Juliette Low as the center piece, paint it, and then the girls can write some of the things they found meaningful in the background of this drawing. We will use the pink ribbon blocks to border the drawing.



This is the first ribbon block. I used the Wikipedia template for the ribbon. The ribbon is three sections fused to the block with Wonderunder.



This is a pieced block that just uses blocks and half-square triangles. Designed by Lesley Brankin, it is found at the My Quilt Patch site. I'm planning to show the girls chain piecing to put it together.



This paper pieced or foundation block from the about.com site may be too tough so I'm going to wait to see what kind of sewing skills the girls have before I bring this one out.

October is turning out to be my month of service. Besides the three sessions with the Girl Scouts, I'm also working on Make a Difference Day with the Piedmont Quilt Guild.

Finn's quilt: update one

After cutting out my nine different stripes in two and a half inch squares, I laid out the top and then began the process of picking up the first two rows for chain piecing.


This is most of the rows pieced.



Once the rows are pieced, then they can be joined to each other.

Links to the tutorials for this baby quilt can be found in the previous post.

Baby step beginnings on the new piece

Sorry for the thin postings these last few days. It's been a rather rotten week and busy on top of that. This weekend has been sent from heaven, though: nowhere to be and time to be together. We went out for breakfast Saturday morning and then while Jim worked in his study, I had some time to work on the Brownies quilt. I've decided to do traditional appliqué rather than raw edge fusible appliqué. The first set of hands is ready to go.



Socks and the top of the hat are also ready to go for the main brownie. Then I'll do the brown work on the rest of the figure.



The border around the main Brownie block is square within a square blocks so I also started chain piecing those. There were so few light fabrics in the Thimbleberries stock that I had to try several combinations to get the right light/dark contrast. This quilt is for a challenge that Randy's Quilt Shop is having so I must limit myself to just Thimbleberries fabrics. Here's the original post about the design.



I know lots of people are interested in unique notions so I thought I'd show you this thumb pin cushion. I found it at a quilt show years ago when I was first learning appliqué from my friend Anita Hardwick.

Baby Quilt, Part 2

My dear friend, Chris Schaefer, taught me some wonderful speed piecing techniques as well as this nifty way to pick up squares all at once. She's also the person who taught me to keep sewing onto a little scrap fabric tag rather than cutting the thread each time. Not only does it save time and effort, but also prevents threads getting knotted up on the backside of the fabric.

Now to begin machine piecing the baby quilt: Once all the squares are laid out in place, turn all squares in vertical row two face down onto the squares in vertical row one.

Pick up the pairs of squares starting at the top and keeping the first two on top of the pile. Put each succeeding pair under the one before it. Chain piece the pairs in this row together.

Pick up vertical row three beginning with the top square and always putting the next square underneath.

Open the first pair you sewed together and sew the top square in the pile to it, then, chaining it to the next block, sew the second square to the pair below and so one until you reach the last pair.

Pick up row four and sew.

Continue through the final row, making sure to keep the whole thing chained together.




Press (as in DON'T IRON!) all the seams in the top horizontal row in one direction, then press the seams in the next row in the opposite direction.

Match up seams and pin. Sew rows one and two together.

Press seam down. Press row three seams opposite to row two seams and sew that row to the first two.

Continue on until all rows are sewn together.

Press well on the back side.

Coming in Part 3: How to make borders that don't ripple.