A First for Me

Most people that know me know that I make "Art" quilts, as opposed to "doll" quilts. Who would dedicate hours of creative mind and precious sewing time to making a blanket for a DOLL?? I make my mini's to either hang on a wall or to use as table pieces. Dolls, hummm, I really don't think so. Or so I thought.

OK, so this is a first. My very soon to be 3-year old daughter has been on an orange kick. Every clothing store we shop in she pulls the orange pieces off of the racks. Same is true for when we are at the fabric shops (which is considerably more often than when we shop for clothes). While I was at the Maine Quilt Show a few weeks ago, I picked up some fun orange prints - some from Mendocino, and from Farmer's Market, and a few others. I thought Sophie'd get a kick out of them. She did, only she was not too keen on me cutting them up to make anything, so I did it rather discretely.
We celebrated her 3rd birthday yesterday, and she got a bunch of homemade baby doll clothes from my mother, another baby blanket from her, and I made her this baby quilt (aka doll quilt). I had no idea my mother was at her machine too. The curved piecing was liberating and fun. I had no pattern, just wanted the piece to have movement. The quilting took 3 hours surprisingly. I'm not sure I'll ever quilt a piece so much with my walking foot. Mine does not feed perfectly all of the time, so there are places when the fabric was bias and wanted to pucker a tad. My green sashings show this more than anywhere else. Had it not been for a silly doll I might have panicked.

It sort of reminds me of corduroy. It definitely carries that feeling of water movement. It's a quilting that I'd love to do with a long arm. I've tried it on my machine but have not been able to move the fabric evenly enough to keep spacings.

Stay tuned...I'll show more sewing that was done for Sophie's birthday this week. I was busy the last 5 days preparing for her party so my sewing machine was off collecting dust this week. Not for long; I am preparing a number of scrappy kid-friendly Project Linus quilts to complete prior to a September 19th event where I will bring all of the ones made this year (thus far it is 46).