The thrilling story of the Robot baby quilt

So, I made this quilt for my first nephew. By the time my first niece was around, I had my Spoonflower account and wanted to use that to create the top for a whole-cloth quilt for her. My brother is a giant nerd like I am, and sci-fi figures heavily into our mental space. So, robots!



The backing & binding is flannel cut from a bed sheet, like the first one I did.



As you can see, I actually finished & gave this quilt almost three years ago. Amazingly for me, I actually got it done in time for the baby shower, before she was born! But only just barely - and there's a reason why I never got any photos of it until now.

I spent a lot of time getting the design the way I wanted it. I decided doing a grid of five robots by seven robots would produce nicely-sized bots. So I sketched 17 different robots, each of which was colored in twice (one flipped the other direction), plus an 18th robot which was only used once. Can you find the unique robot? Hint - it's a reference to a sci-fi TV show! My brother's favorite show, in fact. Next, I got the robots into the grid - I tried to make sure that duplicate robots didn't end up in the same column or row, and that there were no groupings dominated by a single color. It ended up being like a very colorful form of Sudoku. I suppose it would have been easier if I'd placed the robots first, and then colored, but no matter!

By the time I finished all that, there was no time to wait for a proof from Spoonflower before ordering the final cloth. There are a few tweaks I would have made...but heck, I'm pretty sure if I don't point those things out, nobody else would notice. So I'll say no more.

By the time I had the printed top delivered, and assembled it for quilting, there wasn't much time before the shower. All our family is up in Northern California, so we were going to visit my husband's family for a day or two on the way to the shower. I made sure to make the bias tape for the binding before we left since that's pretty much impossible to make on the road. I was still furiously quilting at the start of the trip. I went with a simple quilting scheme - an oval around each robot. I finished that up at my mother-in-law's house and started on the binding. The day of the baby shower, we left her house to drive to the town where the shower was (two hours away) and I kept sewing the binding in the car. I think I had two sides left where the binding needed to be sewn to the back when we arrived at my mother's house, just an hour or two before we needed to go to my brother's house for the shower!

Next, it got really hilarious. My brother, completely unaware of my frantic efforts to finish sewing, kept calling and asking me to prep things for the shower! I can't remember all of it, but at least one request was to look through our parents' stuff to find some obscure AV cable for the music setup he wanted to use for the shower. I delegated to mom instead, ha ha.

I still had a few inches to sew when we had to leave to make it to my brother's house on time - about 10 minutes away. I grabbed a gift bag, so I could just shove the blanket in and not have to wrap it, and kept sewing in the car. I finished just as we pulled in to their street and shoved it in the bag. That is cutting it close!

It was a hit. I had kept the whole thing a surprise from my brother and sister-in-law, so they were delighted to realize that I had not only sewn the quilt, but drawn the design as well. My brother recognized my drawing style. They later told me that it made a fun playmat as well - my niece would sit on it and poke at the robots.

Since the party was so hectic, and I only had the finished quilt in my possession for about five seconds, I didn't have a chance to get a picture of it. I never managed to remember to get a picture at visits after that either. However, this year at Thanksgiving I finally was able to make some time and grabbed a few quick snaps.



Hopefully I'll have a few more finished quilts to post here soon!

Finished!

I finished the quilt for Cord! Even though I still have three more baby blankets to make, I feel like I'm back on track since the rest are for babies still well under a year old.

I was debating how much of the outlines around the pool to quilt, and eventually decided I would be happiest if I did all of it. That includes the edge of the water and the pool, the grout lines, and the outline of the main frames of the goals.

I printed out a tag for the back (including care instructions!) via Spoonflower as well. You can see the backing fabric through it, but I kind of like the effect. The backing fabric is a flannel that I bought from Fabric.com via Amazon. The batting is Quilter's Dream Cotton, in the "request" loft, which is the thinnest.

For previous quilts, I've made the bias tape for the binding myself, but that's something that takes me awhile. I haven't ever had a space where it's easy to lay out those large squares and draw lines on them, plus I just can't seem to get it lined up correctly when sewing the initial cylinder. So in order to help things along, I shopped around for some bias tape on Etsy. I was hoping to find a grey tape with white polka dots, so I was really happy to find this! The seller (Beewise Goods) only had her tapes listed in packages of two yards each, but I needed about five to bind this quilt. So I messaged her, and happily she was able to sell me a package of six continuous yards! The only way it could have been more perfect is if it was double-fold, but it looks great, and most importantly, I was able to finish it!

In the end, it took me just over a month from when I got all of the main components to finishing this up! I'm definitely a faster sewer than I used to be.

Continuing quilting

So, I've decided how I'm going to do the rest of the quilting for Maren's quilt. She's a Gemini, so I'm going to quilt a large Gemini symbol on either side of each of the five flags. Here's the first one:

I don't believe in any of that astrology malarkey, but it's a rich vein of symbolism and personalization! I found this script-like version of the symbol, which has a pleasing appearance. So I blew it up to ten inches tall (the same size as the flags) and printed it out. To make it more pliable and fabric-like, I thoroughly crumpled up the paper. I learned that trick in art class in elementary school!

To use it for quilting, I just pin it in place.

With a design this curvy and continuous, there's really no way to avoid having to turn the quilt every which way to maintain the right-to-left sewing direction. But in order to minimize stopping & starting threads, I have a strategy to sew each symbol using just one length.

I start a long thread at one corner, with half on each side of the starting point (that's the stage the photo above is at). With the first half, I sew around one "edge" of the design - going around the outside of the outer loops, and the inside of the rectangular section. For the parts in the interior of the design, I skip under the quilt top.

With the second half, I do the other "edge" - the insides of the outer loops, and the outsides of the rectangular section. Notice I haven't cut out the holes for the insides of the outer loops. I just eyeball those when I sew them, since they're pretty small and easy to line up once the first half is already quilted.

The hardest part of this process is getting the template pinned to the right place, so that it's lined up vertically with the flag and horizontally with the existing quilted symbols.

Quilting progess on baby blankets

So the two baby blankets I'm working on are both well into the process of quilting. For Maren's quilt, I started by doing (faux) stitch-in-the-ditch to outline all the pieced-looking segments. This was probably the easiest quilting I've ever done! The lines were of course very easy to follow, and since it was a cheater print there were no thick seam allowances on the underside to navigate. I've finished all of that, and am still contemplating exactly what I'll do to fill in the spaces on either side of the column of flags.


For Cord's quilt, I couldn't decide right away what to do. I didn't want to sew over the puppies, and I wanted to do something in the blue segments to suggest splashing/rippling water, without being too time-consuming. I thought about doing stipple quilting, but that definitely failed the "time-consuming" test, as well as being denser than I wanted. I finally settled on doing wavy lines. I focused on just keeping them ad-hoc, and not stressing over getting them perfectly parallel or concentric. That was kind of hard for me! I had to keep stopping myself from picking out segments and redoing them just a few millimeters away. I kept reminding myself that even if I see all kinds of minute imperfections, the likelihood of other people noticing (if I don't point them out) is practically nil. And there's the old crafter's saw, "finished is better than perfect." I do want to give it as a gift as soon as I can!

All the quilting I have left on this one is the outline of the pool and the pool deck.

Second quilt with custom fabric

I mentioned in yesterday's post that I was using Spoonflower to create custom fabric for two baby quilts in progress, but only showed the one for my niece. Here's the one in progress for my nephew:


It's golden lab puppies playing water polo! The inspiration for this is that my brother-in-law is a water polo coach (and my sister-in-law played in high school), and they have a golden lab. So I put those elements together into what I think is a quite adorable scene.

This picture was taken when I had it laid out for basting. I'm still trying to decide exactly how I will quilt it. That's why I've started on the quilting for Maren's first, even though she's younger - I already know exactly how I'm starting that.

Projects using custom fabrics

So the two Spoonflower designs I entered in contests so far (ditsy sugar cubes & ginger roots) were created with a specific project in mind. I'm trying to catch up on making baby blankets for all my nephews and nieces (and my son of course!). So far I've only made the ones for my oldest nephew and oldest niece. The one for my nephew is here, and I actually don't have any photos of the one I made for my oldest niece! Hopefully I can correct that over the coming holiday season. You can see the design itself on Spoonflower, at least.

So next up are the ones for my next oldest nephew and niece. Once I finish those I'll create the one for my son, and once that's done we should have found out whether the next one on my brother's side will be a boy or a girl.

So, back to those two fabric patterns I linked already. My idea for my niece was to spell out her name - "Maren," by the way - using international maritime signal flags. But the twist is that I would change them to more "girly" colors, and represent each color as its own print. Then, I could put the flags together on the quilt in a "cheater" style, to make it appear as though I pieced the images together. I decided to translate the white and red segments into light & dark pink prints, the blue segments into a purple print, and keep the yellow segments in a yellow print. Then I would create a medium pink print with yellow and purple accents to use as the background to tie it all together.

So once I decided on that color scheme, I needed to decide on what the prints would actually be. I decided to do a take on the old cliche "sugar and spice and everything nice." Sugar is represented by sugar cubes and candies on the light and medium pink prints respectively. Spice is represented by ginger on the yellow print. Everything nice could probably not be any more vague, so I just used things that I think are pleasing: roses for the dark pink print and square knots for the purple print. I also added hints of yellow to the dark pink and purple prints to add more balance to the overall design, since the yellow print was only going to get used in the "R" in Maren.

So here are all the prints together:


You can also see them all on Spoonflower.

But wait a minute - there are two purple prints in that photo, not just one! Well, some of the signal flags also use black - though not any of the ones in "Maren" - so I decided to create a darker purple print to stand in for black in case I wanted to create other letters in the future. This print shows sprigs of lavender as a counterpoint to the roses.

But back to the original thread, here is the printed crib-sized quilt top that uses these prints to spell out "Maren":

This picture shows the top laid out over the backing and batting - after this was taken, I basted it together and started quilting. Hopefully I'll be able to post another progress photo soon!

Quilt Plans

I planned out the little demo quilt I made pretty carefully. Once I knew which 20 patches from the book I was going to use, I drew scale versions of each patch and decided how they would be colored - which sections would be the dark, medium, or light fabric. Then I tried different arrangements of the patches, then taped it together once I was satisfied. I arranged it so that the light, medium, and dark fabric would be distributed evenly. I also made sure the more complicated squares were on the inside, and the simpler ones on the edge.

Then, since you quilt from the inside to the edges, I did simple quilting patterns in the middle and more complicated ones at the edge. Basically, as a way to learn more and get better as I went. I drew out the quilting before I started it as well:


Since the marbled print was somewhat directional and the handwritten print was very directional, I was careful when I cut out the pieces so that the prints would go the way I wanted.

First Quilt

This is the first quilt I ever made. It's 2' by 3' - it could be a wall hanging, I suppose? I made it verrrrry slowly over the course of a couple of years. The individual patches were made as I read through Quilter's Complete Guide and did the tutorials. It's a great book - I highly recommend it for anyone thinking of taking up patchwork and quilting, but not sure how to start.
Here are close-ups of the three fabrics I used:

Here's what the back looks like, though you can't see the quilting any more clearly this way due to the print:

A Little Decorative Project

Here's a little thing I sewed from a project in an old craft book, some years back. The project was for a pillow, but as is my wont I scaled it down quite small.

The fabrics are all scraps. In fact, some of them are from free swatches. One weekend while I was still in college I decided to see how many free swatches I could get over the internet. Quite a few, in fact! I have about a half of a shoebox full. The light blue on the bird's breast is from a satin swatch, and the green is from a linen swatch. The bird's eye is embroidered with wool yarn.
Here's the back - the quilting is quite simple:

I actually rather like it - I may put it in a little frame and hang it up. There's a bit of inertia around that though - Mr. Mongie and I currently don't have ANYTHING hung up on our walls.

Another Starting Quilting Project

Here's the second thing I ever quilted:

This time, I actually read some directions on binding first. Here's the back:

Again, quite easy to do due to the small size. The hearts are appliqued to the front. I used a paper template to quilt the smaller hearts at the corners.

First-ever Quilting

Here's the first quilting I ever did, four or five years ago:

It's a little...coaster? I made it out of fabric scraps. The geometric print is apparently not washable, as it bled when I ironed down the seams. But, I didn't pay attention to the directionality of the print, so it's messed up by that anyway. Here's what the back looks like:

I had never learned anything about how to do a binding, and so just made it up as I went, as you can most likely tell. I'm pretty pleased with how the quilting itself turned out (it was through very low-loft polyester batting), but of course it's quite easy to quilt such a small square since you can flip it over to the back.

Fabrics In Baby Quilt

Here's a photo of the fabrics I used for my nephew's quilt - a cute tadpole print, and a plain light green flannel.

The First Bed-size Quilt I Ever Completed

This is my adorable nephew, a week old, with the little quilt I made for him. It's crib-sized. It's whole-cloth, not pieced - the entire top is made from one rectangle of a cute print of tadpoles in jars. I just quilted in straight lines between the print - it was pretty easy, but still looks nice since I let the print do the heavy lifting. The backing & binding are super-soft green flannel (in fact, just cut out of a flannel sheet). I've heard that quilters don't like yellow quilts - not sure why, since it's so cheerful and sunny!