I've been trying to spruce up my apartment a little, and decided that my bedroom is looking pretty bleak in all black, white and gray. To add a bit of color, I figured it's about time to start my first, full sized quilt, and what better way to add color than use some pretty Liberty of London prints.
I went to peruse Purl Soho for some inspiration and they have these little Liberty bundles of fabric. I'm going to pick up the rainbow bundle, and supplement, if necessary, with some tiny busy prints that I pick up elsewhere.
I'm trying to decide on a final pattern for the quilt. I've been eyeing patches like the Oceans Wave, Flying Duchman, and Flying Geese. I'm probably going to use a muslin for the contrasting colors, paired with the Liberty prints to make it a soft beige to lighten up the room a bit.
I like the look of the finished Oceans Wave, which I stumbled upon on the Timeless Reflections blog. I'm still debating though, and put together an excel spreadsheet to quickly mock up some quilt patches, combining different ones in different arrangements. It's pretty neat and I'll post it soon....
After finishing up this Amish Shadows Baby Quilt for my friend's new baby, I finally put together this basic pattern to cut out and make the squares used in this pattern.
Amish Shadows Quilt Pattern
You can download the Amish Shadows Quilt Pattern which includes pattern pieces for making the colored triangle. These pieces don't include the seam allowance though, so you'll need to add that in to all edges of all pieces before cutting your fabric. I typically use a 1/4" seam allowance for quilting.
You can use the pattern pieces to construct each square. For my blanket, since it was for a baby, I assembled 9 squares (each 10" square). Then I added 2 sets of borders around the edges.
To quilt the blanket, I stitched just inside of the lines for each triangle piece, then added a heart to the largest triangle section. The pattern also includes a template for the heart that you can trace onto your quilt.
Typically, I think Amish Shadows quilts are made with bright rainbow colors, and black as the base color, but it just seemed a little too dismal for a baby blanket.
Hopefully you'll enjoy the pattern and make your own baby quilt! Let me know how it goes if you do.
a few months ago, i started and finished my very first quilt. it was a present for my best friend's second baby, so i didn't want to ruin the surprise by posting it on the internet before giving it to her. i wanted an easy pattern for my first quilt, and baby-sized seemed appropriate too. i love geometric shapes and found an amish shadows design in a book. it looked pretty easy to make without the pattern in hand, so i drafted up my own pattern. i used 10" squares with 3 colors evenly spaced diagonally on half of the square, and muslin on the other half.
at the time, we didn't know if it was a boy or girl so i went with some minty green colors, which now actually look more blue. it was a girl - oops. i actually wanted to do red, pink, orange and yellow with beige but the fabric store in savannah was really lacking colors (they kept pushing me to buy these horrible "marbled" fabrics to hide the mistakes that they thought would automatically happen on my first quilt...I told them I'd rather not make the quilt at all).
in the end, I think it turned out pretty well! I definitely learned a lot and my quilting stitches dramatically improved from the start to finish of this one. the quilted hearts are a bit cutesy, but it is for a baby so I thought it was appropriate.
to make the quilt, i bought 2 books, and asked a few questions to my boyfriend's mom, who is a wonderful and very experienced quilter herself. the books, especially the Complete Guide To Quilting by Better Homes and Gardens was AMAZING.
it explains every step, in detail with reasons why on everything, with pictures and text. EVERYTHING related to quilting is covered - picking out materials, fabrics, thread, techniques on cutting, piecing, how to use the rotary cutter and ruler to make perfect strips, templates, appliques, machine piecing, hand piecing, machine and hand quilting, needles, batting choices, basting, binding techniques, etc. it's pretty much the bible of quilting, in my opinion. it even explained the difference between ironing and pressing - who knew??
the other book (It's OK if you sit on my quilt, book), I admit, I bought almost because of it's title...and it's cover. and it was $2.50. it also had great reviews. it's not nearly as comprehensive as the other book, but it is an EXCELLENT supplement. it covers in detail a 'new' approach to piecing together your squares. it takes a more holistic approach and it explains how you can save sooo much time by chunking your piecing rather than stitching together individual shapes. some of this technique is covered in the Complete Guide, but Mary Ellen goes into more detail. she also covers how to visually think about a quilt to come up with some pretty interesting designs. AND she includes hundreds and hundreds of square patterns for you to mix and match into your own quilt design, which is worth the $2.50 alone. together, the complete guide covers all of the basics and serves as an excellent reference book. and once you read through that, mary ellen's book is an excellent way of rethinking quilt designs by focusing on the piecing part of the process.
right now i'm working out the designs for another quilt...more to come on that soon...
lately, i've been making a bit of progress on grandma's quilt. after taking it over to my friend's house for an evening of quilting + dinner, i ambitiously thought i could draw out the fans, lay the pieces out and baste the 'quilt sandwich' together in the span of 3-4 hours. after 4 hours and i'd barely been able to draw out 1 row of fans i knew i needed to re-evaluate. this thing is HUGE. also, that clover water soluble blue marker only drew about 2 rows before it gave out completely.
the next day, i headed over to one of the only quilt stores in NYC, the city quilter, and picked up some water soluble mechanical fabric pencils (one in white; one in gray). the markings from these aren't as dark, but i was able to mark the whole rest of the quilt using just a few leads.
the first 2 pictures are the clover marker marks, and the second the mechanical pencil. i ended up drawing the fans using this little cardboard guide. i made it by cutting a long strip of cardboard, drawing out a straight line down the center, and then stabbing it to make little holes every inch. the first hole at the bottom is the anchor (and i'd stick a pin through it and never pick it up till all of the fans were drawn), then i'd stick my pencil in each hole, one at a time and swing it around, drawing the arcs.
i made my template with the largest arc at 13". i'm realizing most people stop at 8". my quilting hoop is only about 11" so i have to do some partial arcs sometimes. i'd go with 8" next time.
also, 2 straight days of marking this quilt, i came across this amazing blog, with instructions on how to freehand baptist fans. which i may try the next time. marking these things seriously was the worst.
however, in the end it's turning out pretty well. i've quilted a few fans so far and all seems to be going well. i even love the fans on the plain muslin. you can really see how they stick out. i'm realizing this is going to take MONTHS to finish though. yikes.
now that i'm in quilting mode, i'm having this massive pull to start collecting as many fabrics as possible. everytime i see a great print, i think even a half yard of that would be good. i need that fabric. above is my collection so far, mainly of vintage dresses and skirts that are too long and i plan to hem, and use the leftover fabric in my quilts.
here are some of my other favorites online that i've had my eye on:
after my quilting obsession started, i visited my grandma to ask her some basic quilting questions. she mentioned that she had started a quilt a few years ago, finished piecing together the front, but never sandwiched it all together. the only thing left is to quilt the thing.
so, i figured after i had my first quilt done and under my belt (more to come on that later....it's a gift so can't ruin any surprises!) i decided i'd take on this quilt of my grandma's and finish it for her. i love that this is a decades long collaboration between me and her. we both are crafty (we both crochet, and now quilt) and have made countless gifts for one another, but we've never actually made something together.
this thing is gorgeous! all of the tiny pieces again, meticulously pieced together, by my grandma. the problem is that i don't have an available piece of floor (not to mention table space) big enough to lay this thing out to properly sandwich and pin it together!
my plans for this are to use the 'baptist fan' quilting pattern...since i noticed that almost all of my grandma's original quilts used this design. trying to keep it as original as possible here. hopefully i'll have it all done by my next visit to savannah in december to show her.
so, every time i make a journey back to savannah to visit my family, i usually either bring some sort of project to work on that fits neatly into my carry on. this time, i brought nothing (!) and after one day back it was killing me that i had so much free time, and no projects to work on.
on a visit to my grandma's house, she mentioned a quilt that she made.......when she was 15. this prompted us to go digging through all of her closets, pulling out quilt after quilt that she has made over the years. these quilts are GORGEOUS. tiny pieces meticulously stitched to other tiny pieces with every corner matching perfectly, every seam a perfect complement to the next. i assumed the front design was pieced together with a machine, and the quilting was done by hand. nope. ALL handstitched. all million seams for thousand pieces for this king size quilt were handstitched. then, when i asked her about the batting inside, she said, "what do you mean, 'where'd i get it?' i picked the cotton myself." (my grandma is a bit of a tough old bird who grew up on a farm in the country.) turns out she not only picked the cotton, but ran it through the gin, then matted it out to make the layer of cotton cushion inside this quilt.
she let me pick out my favorite and i carted it home to study it and figure out how i was going to get this thing back to nyc in my suitcase. after about 10 minutes i decided that my new project would be a quilt. my boyfriend's mom is an avid quilter, so i spent the next day poring over her quilt book designs (amish quilt designs are pretty unbelievable, by the way), ordered some books online for myself, and picked out my first design i wanted to try. now i'm almost done with my first one, and have some more projects in mind. more to come on that soon!
