Completely Gratuitous Cat Photo

She just looks so stinkin' cute with the quilt.

My Rapid Decline into Old-Ladyhood... part III, the final hurrah.

Once I finished the top of the quilt, I was pretty excited... then I realized, that was only half the battle. I made a back of the quilt, which probably could have been simpler except I had a lot of fabric that I could cut up, and didn't want to waste it. So, I made the whole thing out of 12x12 squares, with 2 stripes of color to add a little interest.

First step was to spread the entire thing out flat, taping down the sides so there were as few wrinkles as possible. Given that this took the entire available space in my living room (with the coffee table and rug moved and the couches pushed around), this was no easy feat. It is possible the hardest part was keeping Charlotte off of it, because she was pretty intrigued.

Then the next step is to make the "quilt sandwich". So, on top of the backing of the quilt put the batting. I used an 80/20 cotton/poly blend with low loft. Then I put on the top, trying to center it (not so easy!). Then, I used a little tool my friend Kristen (who also advised on the whole process) loaned me, which is basically like a price gun that shoots a little plastic thing through all the layers to hold them together- alternatively, you can pin it. The gun was pretty fun, though.

 Then, I rolled it up, because the whole thing has to be fed through the sewing machine (no small feat either)! There are a lot of fancy techniques for the actual quilting, but I wanted to go way simple because frankly, I had no idea what I was doing, and by the time everything was sandwiched together, just maneuvering the whole thing through the machine was tricky.

 I decided to just sew along each seam- my stripes were either 4 inches wide (colors) or 2 inches wide (grey) so it worked out (the batting say to quilt every 4 inches to avoid bunching). I didn't manage to sew the same distance from the edge of each stripe, but, it worked out anyways

Then I had to do the edge, which I was kind of worried about. First I trimmed everything so it was the same size. Then, I cut a bunch of strips of fabric about 3 inches wide and connected them (the way this blog showed me). A lot of the descriptions of binding involved hand sewing, until I found this miraculous post saying that you could do it without doing it by hand, so for my first try, I just went with that. I would describe it in detail, but there are about a million posts about doing this, all by people who know more than I do.

 

And here it is... in all its glory....

*drumroll please*

 

And here is the edge, which despite being a design borne of necessity, is actually a part of it I really like.

And, here is the back, made that way purely for cuteness...

The first night sleeping under that quilt, was the best night ever :).

Also, I know you're concerned, but, Charlotte approves...

If you want to see the rest of the series, here is part 1:

http://yellowfishblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/my-rapid-decline-into-old-ladyhood-part.html

and part 2:

http://yellowfishblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/my-rapid-decline-into-old-ladyhood-part_14.html

 

My Rapid Decline into Old-Ladyhood... part II.

(Ok, so I guess it isn't a rapid decline if the project took months, and now its going to take 3 posts to blog it all, so sue me)

After spending a LOT of time cutting out fabric squares, I was finally ready to sew! this was almost the first time I'd used my sewing machine for anything substantial, so there was a big learning curve and no small amount of swearing and foot stomping (and 2 broken needles, and probably 10x more thread used than was actually needed for the project).

 At this point I started to get extremely excited any time the quilt got noticeably bigger and started obsessively documenting it, which you now get to see...

 Then I started trying to motivate myself by laying it on the bed, so I could imagine what it would ultimately look like...

Unfortunately what you see here is the top end of the quilt... which is very nicely lined up. The other side was not quite so nice, so I ended up trimming it and putting on a wide grey border...

To see how it turned out, stay tuned!

My Rapid Decline into Old-Ladyhood... part I.

A few months back, I got a new bed. I can't for the life of me find a picture of it the way it looked when I got it, but trust me, it is adorable. (btw, in addition, I got a memory foam mattress... holy smokes, is that thing ever comfortable! I looove it!). With the new bed, I decided I needed a new bedspread, but I just couldn't find anything I wanted, especially because I wanted a quilt, and frankly, a lot of quilts are a little to cutesy for me to tolerate. This began a long saga of quilt shopping, including looking at what I imagine was almost every quilt available for sale on the internet. I am picky, and I didn't like any of them. Then I stumbled across a series of blogs with really cute, cool, modern quilts.

And a project was born.

Do I know anything about making a quilt? No, I do not. Fortunately, thanks to the internet, anyone can pretty much do anything, and I learned a lot about what to do... then, I made a plan! I'm not just an old lady, apparently I'm going to be a nerdy old lady, because I decided the best possible plan was to make the design in excel... I don't know how other people do this, but as far as I'm concerned, it was the perfect solution!

I decided on a light grey background with multicolored stripes, in the hopes that stripes would be more forgiving (which they were).

I got my fabric from fabric.com, which I liked because they let you drag the little thumbnails of the patterns next to each other to see if they match... next thing I knew, there was a big pile of fabric in the mail...

I got a rotary fabric cutter, a self-healing cutting mat, and some plastic to make templates out of (most of which came in some getting started quilting kit from Jo-ann's). And, started to cut rectangles- you have to add a .25 inch margin on each piece to allow for a seam.

To see the next phase, stay tuned!