Dolls and Quilts

Or, How I spent my Saturday...

I belong to the Manteca Quilter's Guild, and, as a relative newbie to quilting, I like to take advantage of all the classes that the guild offers. The first class was called "Batik Blast," and we all made a lap-size quilt. I finished mine in good time, using my embroidery machine to do the quilting. The fabrics I chose didn't go so well with the pattern, and the quilt wasn't one of my favorites. However, it does help keep me warm while I'm sewing, so it wasn't a wasted effort.

The next class was all about tile quilting, with the blocks designed to look like mosaic tiles with grout between the tiles. I made two of those; the second one turned out better because I used freezer paper instead of doing needle turn as the instructor taught us. That one may turn out to be a pillow. It was done in Christmas fabrics, so I have plenty of time to finish it.

Yesterday's class involved making stuffed rabbits out of felted wool. I used wool felt rather than spend $25/yard for wool suiting. Anyhow, you can see the result at right. He turned out okay, I guess.  I'm tempted to make another bunny, using the argyle print corduroy left over from this bunny's jacket.

I'm also working on another turtle, like the one I designed for Piper to enter into the doll show. It should be appropriate, since it has a quilted shell.

The quilt guild is hosting its 32nd annual quilt and cloth doll show on March 5th and 6th. There will be a display of these bunnies, and mine may well be there too. Remember though, it won't be just bunnies. There will be a wonderful quilt raffled, as well as a doll. I have raffle tickets to sell if anyone is interested.

Quilted T-Shirts, Part One

(Click photo to enlarge)

Here's the deal; I've committed to making a t-shirt quilt for my DDIL. She went with me to pick out fabric for the background, borders, and sashing. That was the easy part. Because the designs on the t-shirts are all different sizes, I now have various sizes of blocks to work with.  As I cut the shirts apart, I noticed there was lots of leftover fabric, not to mention some 'holes' that would need to be filled.  My embroidery machine came to the rescue. I found some musical designs at Embroidery Library that will help fill in the blank areas.  This photo is the actual stitch-out of the designs I found, on some of that extra fabric.

T-shirts, as you know, are made of stretchy material which can be challenging to sew, when combined with non-stretchy fabric. The steps I took to help prepare the blocks for sewing and/or embroidering were:
1. heavily starch and iron, carefully so as not to stretch the block out of shape.
2. apply iron-on interfacing to the backside of the block, again careful not to stretch the block. I used a lightweight interfacing so the resulting quilt top would still be soft and snuggly.

Now comes the hard part; putting all those blocks into an attractive arrangement.