Number 19

Tomorrow I’m officially 38 weeks pregnant, so I thought I should probably get a wriggle on with bub’s Very Hungry Caterpillar cot quilt. Not that it’s a huge rush I guess, it is Summer here after all, but if I don’t give myself some sort of deadline then I’m unlikely to ever finish it!

Since my last update I spent a morning at my friend Debbie’s and put together the front, wadding and backing. So. Much. Pinning (and not the fun kind)!

I’ve used a really light wadding because a) If I ever put this on the baby in the cot I don’t want it to be super heavy and b) If I put this up on the wall I don’t want it to be super heavy so it falls down. We’re renting (boo!) and have to use those awful sticky wall hooks instead of nailing books into the wall. We could probably ask to put one or two nail hooks up, but seriously, we have quite a few things up already, and that’s without my putting up even a 10th of what we had in our old house.

But back to the quilt… I’m still not 100% sure how I will do all the quilting, so I have just started on the parts I DO know about- some straight lines to ‘steady’ the quilt. I find with the free motion quilting that it’s easy to get gathers etc. so having a few solid lines in key places on the quilt will reduce the likelihood of that happening. I’ve gone around the panel, just inside the striped/spotted border (outside quilt line on diagram below), and also gone around the top and bottom images, in the white part (inside quilt line on diagram below).

My plan is to quilt an outline around the shapes in the three images, and continue this pattern out until I get to that inside quilt line, or the dots. I’m not sure if I should quilt it out like a spiral, or quilt out in complete outlines, just getting about a 1/8 bigger each time. Either way the idea is that the images will ‘puff’ out a bit, and the white around them will be really tight from all the stitching.

I’m still undecided what quilting I will do in the dots, and in the border. Perhaps it will look complete with just the images done? I’ll show another update once this has been done, and we might do a little vote on what I should do next! In the mean time, don’t be shy to tell me what you think!