I could not get this quilt out of my head for weeks. I had a stack of fat quarters I had bought in a pack sitting in my craft room, with no use, and I had been dreaming of different things I could use them for. This idea for a hodge podge quilt with lots of different sized squares and rectangles formed in my mind and I couldn’t get it out.
So after a little while, I started making it. There’s no pattern I followed, I just made it up. Here’s a video of it being made:
I have finally finished Lior’s very hungry caterpillar quilt! I’m pretty happy with how it’s turned out! I did all the quilting myself- some more practice of the free motion quilting. There are three different quilting sections- The border, the dots, and the pictures. Each one I chose to quilt differently, in order to match the style of the area. For example: I quilt traced around the pictures, and then outlined the white area. I outlined random circles in the circle area, and I did a swirly pattern in the border.
So there it is- all finished!
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!
As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve made some progress on my hungry caterpillar quilt. Now, it’s either going to be a cot quilt, or a wall hanging. I’ve yet to decided…
I have another Very Hungry Caterpillar panel which will be the alternate.
My mum gave me this set of fat quarter fabrics for my birthday last year (2010), for this very quilt. No I wasn’t pregnant, and no we weren’t trying, but I had bought the panel at the beginning of the year (or even earlier maybe), because I loved it, and well, I was going to have a baby SOMEDAY.
I basically just cut the fat quarters into a few 2 inch strips, joined them all together, then trimmed them into 5 inch strips. I then joined them together where necessary, to make the length, longer. And unpicked some to make the widths shorter.
The corner pieces are from the Very Hungry Caterpillar series- they’re the big foods he eats on the last day. I really love them there, firstly because I think the white around them breaks up the border a bit, and secondly because it enocrporates the last aspect of the book- the foods.
The same piece of fabric had the fruits on it. I used the main bits of the fruit on the singlets, as just added random pieces of fruit appliqued around the side. I’ll quilt over the top of them so they stay in place.
So it’s bascially all finished, I’ve really just got to add the wadding and backing, pin it all together, and then quilt and bind it. I’m not 100% sure how I’ll quilt it yet. I think I would like to quilt around the main shapes (caterpillar, butterfly, leaf) so that they puff out from the quilt. And I might just repeat the outline over and over till I get to the edge of the white space… It’s hard to describe.
I’m not 100% sure about the rest of it though, so if you have any ideas, please share them with me!
Over at the Creative Collective, July is ‘time to finish’ month! I’m pretty keen to get a whole heap of things finished before I move in a week or so, so this is a very timely project!
My first completed project is the French Roses Table Runner I’ve been working on. Here’s a bit of a photo story on its progress.
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The table runner started in May (at craft group). I was pretty quick with sewing on the pieces. Then things seemed to take a while…
At the end of June I finally decided to get my act together and quilt the darn thing. I think the reason it took so long was because I was struggling with HOW to quilt it. Do you like how it turned out?
Finally, I’ve put the binding on last week. Project completed!
As I clean up my craft room I’m finding stacks and stacks more unfinished projects (yikes!), so I’m sure I’ll be able to get stuck into a few more before July is over!
