My Blog

I’ve been so busy sewing, and not blogging. Obviously.

I’ve got tons of things to post, but I wanted to get this up right away, because I’m giving to Emily today!  This quilt started as a smaller quilt  (the stripes in the center)- a crib sized quilt for her son, James.  Now that he’s three (and a big brother, mind you) he’s claimed that he’s too big for the quilt and wanted a bigger one.  So Emily and I spent some time at Intown Quilters and she picked out the colors that she’d like to have around the original quilt.   The plan was to start with the original quilt in the center, then add a border, then add the large color blocks around it.  Since his room has a nautical theme, Emily thought it would be super cute to have sailboats in the corner.  I’m so happy with her vision of this quilt and ultimately, the way its turned out.

It was so fun to deconstruct a quilt.  It was really neat to see how another quilt was constructed.  It looked like it was hand quilted.  The original quilt was made my Pottery Barn Kids, probably by some woman in China, but she did a nice job!  There’s beauitful colored stitching between each block that we really wanted to preserve.  The only tough part to deal with is that the blocks of the original quilt, although they look similar in size, are all different… half inch here, quarter inch there – ultimately made it a bit challenging to deal with.

After getting the binding off, it was time to sit in front of the TV, watch a TiVo’ed Oprah episode, and start picking away at the quilting.

Once the original quilt top had been separated from the quilt, the fun began of figuring out the best way to lay out the new colors.

The sailboats were simply applique.  I used a satin stitich.  What I did NOT know, however, was how hard it is to applique sharp angles like triangles.  But, by the 3rd panel, I had pretty much got the hang of it!

We had picked out brown as a color for the panels, in addition to the red, orange, blues and green that you see.  But as a full sized panel, I thought the brown was too distracting, so instead I used it to “frame” the sailboat blocks, and that seemed to work out nicely 

As far as quilting, I did a simple rectangle, once inside of another, inside of another, and so on; as well as stitching-in-the-ditch around the beige borders and the sailboat panels.  I thought it helped to keep the lines of the quilt simple, and work to elongate the entire look.

Ta-da!  This quilt was originally ~ 35″ x 45″, and now its ~ 50″ x 70″, so its a really nice size increase that James should be able to grow into for years!  It was tall enough that I wasn’t able to really hold it up off the ground – I had to have Matt do it for this photo!  I think Emily did an amzing job picking out all the colors – it came together so nicely!   Oh, and the back is just a solid blue, the same color as the binding.  I chose a real dark blue so it wouldn’t show stains and wear as much over time, because I’m sure this quilt will get a lot of love