A Wallis Baby Quilt

After making the iPad holder, I decided to try my hand at making a small baby quilt with the scraps. It's a really tiny quilt, best for a moses basket or cot I expect. I just don't have the gumption to make anything bigger, plus I really hate making 60° quilts. I love how they look, but I find them so hard to line up as the material is always so stretchy. I am sure my technique is terrible.




It took me weeks and weeks and weeks to do each of the smaller triangle units. I was grabbing a minute here, a minute there. You really can't leave a baby to amuse themselves can you? In desperation I started using the sewing machine during nap time which is never ideal as it's enough to wake up the delicate sleeper. She needs to harden up to the sound of sewing sooner or later! I am glad I am getting the use out of the 60° ruler I bought. It's really great. You can see I cut long strips to begin with. I really starched the fabric first to minimise stretch.




Stupidly though I should have done open seams. I just couldn't get them right so there are terrible lumps where all the points meet. It's a lot of fabric. Then when I came to sewing them, the minute I removed the pin the top layer would be dragged a little bit by the machine and nothing would quite line up. Jeeez. In the end, I just had to be cool about its wonkiness. I am sure most people have wonky quilts up close.




I couldn't decide what binding to do. Spots or solid. In the end I chose solids because I felt the quilt was already quite busy. I think the big print fabric needs to be shown in bigger swathes really. It was also the first time I have quilted 1/4" either side of the ditch rather than in it. I like the star pattern in creates in the middle.




I'm not 100% about my pink backing, but I thought it would pick out the pink of the girls dress. I think I need to get used to it. Let's just hope it's a girl! Stupidly I totally forgot to tape down the backing before I basted it so the whole back has a crease in it. It's so small and yet I get a huge crease. How could I have been so dense? Sometimes I amaze myself. Going backwards is for losers though so I left it. My mum would be horrified. She is a great unpicker of things. I have seen her unpick massive double bed quilt tops just because she thinks the balance is wrong.




And of course, no quilt is complete with a few tags.




So you might think I have just slagged this quilt off, but it is only because I wanted it to be perfect, specially seeing as I have lost my mind since having a baby. All in all I wanted it to be tasteful, not too garish and contemporary. I hope I succeeded in these things. Next I might make a log cabin version just to use up the very last bits. Waste not want not.

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