Life with baby!

I promise I haven't disappeared forever, really!

Things here are going well. Button is 6 weeks old now, and we are slowly (very slowly!) learning how to juggle life and a baby, all in the midst of moving house! So we are currently living amidst a mess of boxes and craziness, because unpacking has to be done around nappy changing and feedings and burpings!

It's hectic, but this little face makes it worth it :)

I can't wait to get back into some crafting again, but first I have to find the boxes containing my things, and also find a way to put the baby down once in awhile. Button is not a fan of laying in the moses basket for more than a few minutes at a time, so I am learning how to do everything with a baby in one arm or the other. It is so tiring! Also it's surprising how heavy a 9ish pound baby can seem after carrying him around all day. Hopefully when he learns to grasp and play with things he'll be able to amuse himself for a bit longer so I can return to being somewhat productive, but at the moment he seems to only be happy in my arms!

As a side note, those burp cloths I made? SO useful! I wish I had made more than 5, because I use them so much. They are extremely useful for tucking into my bra when I'm feeding to avoid getting milk all over my shirt, and for slinging over my shoulder while I'm burping Button, and even for laying down under Button's head so that when he spits up in his moses basket (the few times he's tolerated being in it!) it gets absorbed and the mattress stays clean! I definitely recommend them as a baby shower gift (or just for yourself).

Button Arrives!

We have a baby! Button arrived on July 25, weighing in at a healthy 7lbs 2oz. He is gorgeous and perfect in every way!

Little Button!

Sheep and Chevrons Car Seat Cover

So today I decided to FINALLY check out the fabric store that is (sort of) nearby. I trekked across Sheffield, which was a pain because of roadworks and a main road being closed and I had a bit of trouble getting around it, but eventually I made my way to Patchwork Garden. It's a really cute little store. Not really on the scale of fabric stores in the US in terms of quantity, but they had a lot of really cute fabrics and a decent amount of choice for how small the store was.

So I found some pretty cute fabric with little sheep on it, and a sort of matching stripey fabric. I didn't really have a particular project in mind when I went into the store but I had a quick look on Pinterest before setting out and decided this fabric would look cute as a car seat cover or a light quilt or something similar. So I got 1 1/2 metres of each fabric, so I'd hopefully have some extra depending on what I wanted to do with it.

So when I got home I eventually decided a car seat cover was a good project, and was something a bit different and would require a bit more engineering than just a standard quilt. I found a pattern on CraftStylish via Pinterest, and used this as a rough guide for measurements, but mostly I worked the size and everything myself, because I wanted a bit more of an intricate design.

My inspiration.

I decided to do a chevron pattern, so sketched out a rough estimate of how many triangles I'd need and the rough sizes, and decided on 6.5" squares to make 6" HSTs, to make an eventual cover that was 36 x 42" (6 x 7 HST squares).

The cute fabric cut into squares! Sheeps!

After cutting out squares, I used a fabric pen to mark cross corners of all of my gray squares. You can try eyeballing this if you prefer while you're sewing, but I don't trust myself to do that because I am a bit of a speed demon and tend to make mistakes that way.

Next I used one of my favourite techniques - chain piecing. I'm not actually sure if this is the proper name for it, but if you're doing something really repetitive like making a gazillion half square triangles, it speeds things up considerably, and also saves on thread waste as well.

Chain piecing in progress.

To chain piece, basically just don't break the thread in between pieces and keep on going. I sewed 1/4" to each side of the marked line. You can break the pieces after doing the first chain of seams, or if you're impatient like me you can keep them all chained up and just flip the chain around to sew the second side.

After sewing both sides, cut down the marked line, and press open - voila, a million HST squares!

Lots of squares! I did these all randomly, but if you have a directional fabric that you want to all be in the same direction, you'll have to do a bit more planning.

The next part I did a little bit oddly, and again this is sort of how you like to put things together, but I like to put bigger pieces together, so I basically just sewed all the squares together in pairs. I alternated them just to make sure I'd have them in the right configuration, but in hindsight I'm pretty sure this wasn't necessary.

The makings of chevrons!

I'll spare you the boring details, but basically I lined these bits up and sewed them into the top of the cover. I then pieced together the back using scraps, because I (once again) cut more squares than I needed. Sew the top and bottom right sides together, curving the corners if you want, leaving a space to turn. I then edge stitched the top all the way around, and lightly quilted along the chevrons just to keep the layers of the top from coming apart. You can embellish with rickrack or binding or whatever, but I just kept it simple. There are also some versions that have flaps to open the cover, but I like the idea of using this as a kind of light quilt or nursing cover or something as well, so I kept it as is.

I then pieced together some scraps for the handles, measured out where I wanted them - it turned out they were going in the exact centre of the top to fit my car seat, but if you have a particular car seat I'd advise measuring it to make sure it works for yours.

The inspiration used velcro, but as I couldn't find any non sticky velcro, I opted for buttons (also, buttons for Button - yay!). I had a bit of trouble with the buttonhole function of my sewing machine, so I practiced on some scraps beforehand, and used this tutorial which was quite helpful, and eventually I got 3 buttonholes on each strap.

I didn't take any pictures of this process, because my phone battery died, but basically the procedure in the tutorial on CraftStylish is pretty good, you may just have to alter the measurements slightly for your exact needs and how you want your cover to hang.

A finished car seat cover!

I think it's a little bit big, cause the edges are touching the ground, so if I made it again I might take off one row of squares from the length and then add a small border to get a better size, but overall I think it turned out pretty well. It's not got any batting in between the layers, so it's really lightweight, and I think it'll be useful for keeping Button asleep while we're out and about, and keeping the sun off him as well. Plus it will be useful for deterring random people from disturbing him while he's napping!

Still no signs of Button's arrival yet, although I've been feeling more and more intense Braxton Hicks contractions, so hopefully that's a sign things are moving along. This hot weather is killing me though! I can't believe I used to survive American summers, because it's only like 24 C (75 F) here and I'm dying! Granted we had air-conditioning pretty much everywhere in the US, so whenever I was inside I'd have sweatshirts on throughout the whole summer.

Despite no baby yet, A and I have decided to move back to Edinburgh to be nearer to family, which will be really nice once Button is here. Originally we were going to stay in England, because I absolutely love my job, but being on maternity leave so far from family and friends was a bit of a bleak prospect, and various things occurring at once that make it the ideal time to move back. Despite the sadness of leaving my coworkers here that have been so amazing and supportive, and leaving some of my clients and their pets that I've grown to love, I am extremely excited to move back to the greatest and most beautiful city in the world, and hopefully get back some semblance of a social life as well! It's all happening in the next month!

Cross your fingers Button arrives soon! :)

Scrap-Buster Project #2 - Burp Cloths!

My recent absence has not been because I've had Button (I wish!), it's only been because I ran out of thread while working on my lattices quilt, and the store hasn't re-stocked the right colour yet since I cleaned them out last week, so I've been trying to come up with some new projects, but I'm really bad at committing, especially when I don't have that much of a fabric stash to play with.

Fancy burp cloths!

So today's project happened because I'd gone to get lots of nursing shirts at the local Mothercare and Kiddicare, and I happened to find some terrycloth nappies on sale, so I got a bunch because I'd seen some examples of burp cloths on Pinterest that looked really easy and fun. You can also probably use just a cheap bath towel or pre-fold nappies, or the Mio Bambino nappy inserts would probably be great too (and much less messy to work with!), but probably more expensive. So depends what you like and what you want the finished product to look like.

I didn't really use a pattern for this, so I'll just go through what I did. The finished size of my burp cloths were dictated mostly by my scrap sizes and by the size of the terrycloth nappies, but they're roughly about 7 x 20.5".

1. Cut out your fabric in 7.5 x 21" rectangles (or desired final size plus about 0.5" on each side for seam allowances). 

I used 2 terrycloth layers because I felt that just one layer wasn't thick enough, but I wasn't sure how my machine would handle 3 layers, so I decided to go for 2. If you like a thinner thickness, by all means layer them how you will. If you do decide to use more than one layer, as I did, I'd recommend sewing them together around the edges first, as otherwise the layers tend to move around and everything ends up squint.

2. With RIGHT sides together, pin your fabric to your terrycloth and trace the curved edges (I used the top of an ice cream container as my guide). 

I traced out the full shape in that picture because due to my lack of rotary cutter my pieces were by no means straight edged.

3. Sew around your tracings, making sure to leave a gap for turning, and then cut off the excess fabric.

I like to use pinking shears for cutting as I think it reduces fraying and excess bulk. However, be warned that if you're using terrycloth, you will get terrycloth 'droppings' EVERYWHERE. I was literally covered in tiny white bits of terrycloth after this. I need a decontamination zone between my crafting area and the rest of the house. Sorry husband dearest! :P

4. Turn burp cloth right side out, iron, and fold in the seam where the gap was, and then edge stitch around the whole thing.

5. Fold cloths into thirds, and sew 2 straight lines to divide it lengthwise into thirds. This makes it easier to fold the cloths, and also helps keep the layers in the right place.

There you have it! Easy as pie! I cranked out 5 of these in about 2 hours. It's really easy and requires minimal sewing skills. They'd make great baby shower gifts. You can also embellish them with ribbon or embroidery or appliqué or other things if you like, but these are just for me, so they're not perfect, they're a little wonky in places, and they're fairly plain. I have lots of leftover terrycloth, so I might make some more and try to fancy them up a bit, but we'll see if I can find some other creative uses for them first!

A stack of finished burp cloths! Tie together with some matching ribbon for a nice gift!

Lattices and Lillies - Part 2

So today I set about trying to figure out how to make the back of the quilt work, given that I hadn't really gotten enough fabric for the backing, which was originally going to be solid green with one lattice block in the corner. Because I had a few extra triangles, I decided to just make a row of blocks instead.

The colour of the back doesn't really show well here, it's a bit more of a blueish green than the weird olive-y colour it shows here. But anyway, after measuring that my quilt was around 41" square, I decided (to be safe) to make the backing about 43" square to give a bit of leeway. After constructing the blocks I still didn't have enough width, so added some 3" strips to either side, and then cut the remaining fabric in 2 segments, one about 8" and one about 24". So that should give me a backing that is slightly bigger than necessary, which is good, better too much than not enough!

I also had to decide what to do about the binding. Given the dimensions of my quilt, I calculated I needed about 172" of binding, plus a bit of extra, so 200". Ideally I'd have probably wanted to use either the lattice fabric or the backing fabric, but in typical me fashion, I cut too many strips for the lattice itself, which were too thin for binding, and wasn't left with enough. Fortunately, from the fat quarters I had a small strip of each left over, and managed to scrape together enough fabric. In fact, I probably have too much now. I think I have about 300" or so. I'm not sure how it'll look as well, might be too busy, but I'll have a play around with it before sewing it on. Otherwise I'll probably get an unrelated fabric in a matching colour.

My binding roll!

Now I just have to wait for the batting to arrive in the post so I can start quilting, because the leftovers from my last quilts are just a few inches too small! I feel like I spend half my time waiting for things to arrive in the post.

In other news, I'm getting seriously ready to have this baby now, especially now that Button is considered full term (yay!). Much as I love being pregnant (most of the time), I have forgotten what it's like to walk without waddling, or turn over in bed without grunting. I feel like a bit of a time bomb, and I'm just ready to experience labour, and have my life totally changed. I know I'll probably miss feeling Button kicking inside me (even though sometimes it hurts!), and knowing that my body is capable of such a miraculous and amazing thing, but I can't wait for the adventures that Button will bring!

Turning Squares - FIUF

It's done! I LOVE how this one turned out. I decided in the end to use the leftover binding from my last quilt, because the colour matched perfectly, and also the spots sort of echoed the orange spotty giraffes that appear in some of the patchwork strips. I had a little trouble attaching the binding because of the way the fabric warped with the spiral - I had to unpick it in several spots and resew. But I think I'm slowly learning some patience. Also my walking foot came in the post today, which made the binding go on a bit more straight. Definitely going to be using that foot a lot!

It's just so colourful and fun! It's also incredibly snuggly and the perfect weight for a baby quilt. I used the same batting as in my last quilt - a cotton/bamboo blend, which I sadly am now running out of, so I'll have to get some more for my next project.

I'm debating bringing it to the hospital with us to bring Button home in, because I absolutely cannot wait to wrap him in this!

The full quilt top with the binding. Needs a bit of ironing on the binding, but I'm so pleased with it! Now I have to come up with a plan for the remaining fabric from this line. I'm tempted to make another the same as a gift, but I'll have to have a think first. :)

Another finish it up Friday success!

Turning squares - Part 2

I've finished the quilting of my turning squares quilt! I decided in the end to go with a spiral pattern. The somewhat challenging thing about doing this was that because both the back and front of the quilt had a distinct centre, I needed to find a way to match them up as near perfect as possible, otherwise the spiral would look strange.

The way I decided to do this was before taping my quilt back to the floor, I stuck a straight pin through the centre, sharp side up. Then when laying the layers on top, I just had to make sure that I placed the centre first. It was a little challenging, because I also wanted to line up the corners and the centre seams of each side, so swivelling the fabric around on top of the batting was a bit of a pain. In the end I got everything pretty well centred.

Once all the layers were basted together, I found a small bottle cap to mark out a circle in the centre. In hindsight I probably should have just started in the centre and spiralled outward, but I thought a circle would look better. Oh well.

I used my normal presser foot for this, and think (again, hindsight!) that a darning foot would have been easier at this point, because the circle was so tight I had a lot of trouble turning the quilt. Eventually I got it, after a few false starts.

Another thing I'll say that would have made my life much easier had I thought about it. I recommend going CLOCKWISE in your spiral. I started out anti-clockwise, and realised as soon as I got a bit further out from the centre, that this meant that at some point I would be trying to swivel the entire bulk of my quilt through the harp space (that's the bit in between the needle and the arm) of the machine. Silly me.

Fortunately, as you can see, this quilt was fairly small so it all fit through the machine and was only a little annoying at times, but if you're doing a large quilt in this fashion, it probably would get really difficult. I suppose on the flip side had I done it the other way I might have struggled with the bulk of the quilt pulling off the table, but I could have fixed this by moving my machine to a better part of the dining table.

Here's the result! I had some issues with the fabric warping a bit. Possibly a walking foot would be a better choice once you're out of the tight inner circle, but I don't yet have a walking foot. So it's a bit wonky in places, but I like the overall effect. I didn't do the spirals too perfectly. Not only did I think this would make the process much slower, but I also thought that if I tried to make it perfect, I'd undoubtedly notice any imperfections much more. So while I used my presser foot width as a rough guide I made sure to just do it in a rough sort of way.

Closeup of my somewhat wonky lines.

Here's what the back looks like. There are a few places where there are some wrinkles in the backing. It REALLY annoys me, but the majority of them were so far back towards the centre that it would have been an absolute nightmare to unpick and fix, and I only noticed at the end. Oh well, live and learn. Since this is just for Button, I'm just leaving it. If I were ever to bring a quilt to any kind of contest or festival or whatever, or if it were a gift for someone else, I'd probably be much more persnickity, but hopefully Button is not going to mind.

Now my next task is figuring out what to use for binding. I have a lot of extra stripey fabric, but I'm not sure if it would be better to just use white, as it's a very busy quilt as it is. But for now, a nap!

Turning Squares Quilt

Here's my next project! I'm seriously on a bit of a crafting binge. So this is another Moda Bake Shop pattern which features a quilt from Kitchen Table Quilting, but I've made it much much smaller than the original pattern, because it's for baby Button! 

Here is my inspiration. Turning Squares Quilt

Gorgeous isn't it? I love the colours of it as well, but since this is for a baby boy, I wanted something a little less girly and pink. So I chose the Giraffe Crossing line by Riley Blake Designs.

It's hard to see the patterns, but there are giraffes, and it is adorable.

It's not specifically boy fabric, but I like that. I'd rather have it somewhat neutral anyway. I originally planned on having 3x4 squares for the quilt rather than the 6x6 squares of the original, and as usual I miscalculated the amount of fabric I'd need. For some reason I find this really difficult. Ask me to calculate a drug dosage and I'll give it to you in 15 seconds, but after an hour of trying to work out how many strips of each thing I needed, I got it all wrong.

So anyway, you basically need 3, 2.5x12.5 inch strips and 6, 2.5x6.5 inch strips for each square. This is a great jelly-roll project, as seriously cutting is so tedious without a rotary cutter! Also I feel like I'm more likely to have things straight and in line if they're precut in some way. Plus I'm a bit lazy. Hah!

In the tutorial, she has you just making a bunch of squares, however I know that if I just made the squares I'd end up with all the light coloured bits on one side and it wouldn't look random enough. So I chose to lay out the strips. I also drew a sketch of how I wanted the turning squares bits to look, as I was making it so much smaller so wanted it to still look okay since it wouldn't be able to be quite as symmetrical as the original.

As I was laying it out, I realised that, once again, my plans were a bit too big for purpose, so I decided to do a 3x3 square quilt instead, which is a bit more portable and can be used as the cradle quilt and a pram quilt. Plus now I have oodles of fabric left over and can make lots of other things with this adorable fabric!

I'll spare you the details of the actual sewing bit, as I basically did as Erica described in the tutorial. I did struggle to line up the seams, as usual, but I managed to muster the patience to unpick a few bits and lined nearly all of the seams up pretty well. I imagine this would be easier if I had a rotary cutter and mat and could trim the pieces to exact squares, as at the moment I'm really just eyeballing if things are square.

Now here's where I went off on my own for a bit. My backing fabric was from the same line, the lightest of the stripey fabric, but I wanted to do something a little more exciting with it than just slap it on the back. Partly this is because it was just after lunch and I still needed some way to occupy myself for the rest of today, and partly because I like how the last quilt had the patchwork detail, and I felt this one needed something interesting on the back as well.

After a few sketches of various ways to treat the striped fabric, I came up with a sort of play on the turning squares, and made kind of turning triangles for the back.

For this I needed 4 squares of the fabric, each measuring half the dimensions of the quilt top. I measured the quilt top at 36.5" (93cm) square exactly, so I halved it and then added some extra to make sure I had some leeway to line things up if the sewing wasn't exact. So I cut out 4, 50cm squares of my backing fabric. I then pinned it all together to keep it stable, and folded it in half into a triangle and ironed it to have a line to cut on. Sorry I didn't take pictures of any of this process, but basically it's as easy as it sounds.

Once I cut the triangles, I again laid it all out onto my table, played around with it a bit to see if there were any better ways to do it, and then started sewing!

Somehow I managed to match the corner seems up perfectly on the first try. This nearly never happens with me, so I was quite excited about it, and I think the back looks pretty neat!

Tomorrow, it's on to fixing the batting and starting to quilt it together! I'm thinking at this point I might try a new quilting pattern. I'm thinking doing either one big spiral around the quilt to contrast with all the straight lines or doing random wavy lines out from the centre. My only issue with this is trying to make sure I have the centre of the top and bottom lined up exactly, but I have a plan to accomplish this. More on this tomorrow! :)

In other, non-crafty related news, I had a midwife appointment today, and all is proceeding as planned. Button's head is engaged, and he's getting ready for his big entrance! Ahh!

Knitted Chevrons

Here's a project I've been working on pretty much since the first month of pregnancy.

Really recommend this book, lots of great patterns!

A knitted baby blanket! I found this great book of baby blankets, and loved so many of them. I chose one that looked interesting enough to hold my attention while being easy enough that I could watch the tele while knitting.

I chose fairly gender-neutral colours, since at the time I didn't actually know whether Button was a he or she, but they actually lend themselves quite well to a baby boy anyway, since it's mostly the blue and grey. The yarn I chose was Sirdar's Snuggly Baby Bamboo, which is really soft and cozy and nice, and the blanket hangs quite nicely without being stiff. I kind of wish I'd chosen the colours a bit better, and had white replacing either the grey or blue (the orange is for the border), just so it would have a bit more contrast, but it still looks pretty nice anyway.

The pattern actually called for a heavier weight yarn, and originally the pattern was coming out way too loose, so I reduced the needle size by 1 mm and also added an extra chevron to it to keep the width. In hindsight I think the extra chevron panel was unnecessary, as I feel like it's now got to be super long to keep it in proportion.

Closeup of the chevrons

I do quite like the pattern still, and I think it looks really nice, but I have to say I am not the biggest fan of making blankets anymore. They take SO LONG, and use SO MUCH YARN! I imagine this will be another project that gets finished while I'm on maternity leave because I'll just have to crank it out while watching a film or something. I kind of wish I hadn't started it now, but I'm about 2/3 done, so I just really have to suck it up and finish it.

As an aside, here is a little glimpse of our nursery! It is a VERY small little room (A's former study), but at least it has just enough room for the cotbed and a nursing chair. 

I love the colour we chose, it's such a nice happy lemon-y colour! The awesome little whale pillow was commissioned by A from a crafty friend of ours for my birthday. It's so sweet! The shelves were an absolute nightmare to put up because the outer walls are all masonry. It was a very frustrating process for A. But he did a good job!

The cotbed is our kind of baby gear dumping ground at the moment, as there's really no storage in our house at all, and Button will be in a little crib in our room or in a moses basket wherever I am for the first few months anyway, so this will probably be mostly used for nursing at night when A is asleep and storage until Button is old enough to sleep on his own in here. In hindsight I think we went a bit overboard with the cotbed, but it will be handy for the future as it converts to a really nice looking toddler bed!

It's all getting a little bit real now - I have my one final day at work on Monday, and then I'm officially on maternity leave for 9 months! Ahh! Tomorrow I'm baking a delicious New York Cheesecake for everyone at work to celebrate (and to introduce them to proper cheesecake, not the weird mousse-y stuff that they consider cheesecake here in the UK), so I may make a post on that as it's the best recipe I've ever found, and I need to share it with everyone. Ta ta for now!

Finish it up Friday!

Here is my finished quilt for Button! I didn't actually finish it today - as could possibly have been anticipated I got bored one night after work and finished the stippling, and then started on the binding. Please excuse the crazy expression, I stayed up a bit late to finish it off, and it was way past my bedtime (which, during pregnancy, has been about 10pm!)

I really love the orange binding pop on the front, and my little dark patch at the bottom, random though it is. I think it helps bring out the orange on the quilt itself. Oddly, I calculated the number of cm of binding I would need as 500cm (the quilt was 133 x 108cm plus a bit of wiggle room), and thought I had JUST enough to make the binding strips and even made them a bit smaller than I would have otherwise, I seem to have ended up with nearly twice the amount of binding strips I needed. I have no idea what happened. But better too much than too little! Only shame is that now I used up the remaining orange fabric for binding. I'm sure I'll find a use for it at some point!

I was surprised at how easy the binding process itself was, and even though I had to hand-sew the last side of the binding it went really quickly and I did it all in a few hours while cuddling up to my hubby while he watched football. I only poked him with the needle once, I swear!

Here's the back view so you can see the patchwork detail. It ended up lining up pretty well and I didn't have to chop off too much of the two coins on the edge.

All in all a pretty good job I think! I've just gotten my fabric for the pram-sized quilt now (another Riley Blake design - Giraffe Crossing!), but I've been threatened with divorce if I start it before my maternity leave (A knows me too well, and knows that I would finish it this weekend if I got going on it!). So instead I am perusing patterns to try and find a pattern that works. I'm not sure I can handle waiting until Tuesday to start, especially because I have today off while A is working, and I'm not really sure what to do with myself while watching trashy tv!

Stacked Coins Quilt

Sorry there'll be a few posts coming rapid fire to showcase my current projects! First up:

I decided to make this Stacked Coins Quilt for Button, from the pattern on Moda's Bake Shop. It's a fairly simple quilt, good for cranking out in a relatively short time. As it was my first foray back into quilting after a few years, I wanted something fairly quick and easy. Also I didn't really know how long it would take me, and I envisioned Button arriving early and chaos ensuing. I only fairly recently got a new sewing machine, a Janome DC3050! I haven't named it yet, but I haven't used it much, so hopefully as I start to use it more I'll come up with something suitable.

I'd never heard of the brand Janome before, but I have been pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to use, and how versatile (and no, I'm not being paid to say that - I wish!) I don't know if the brand has made it to the US - I always used a Brother machine which was pretty great, especially given that I got it in middle school (I was a crafting geek even then!), and it was still working well when I left. However it was a bit difficult to transport to the UK!

Anyway, the quilt. In hindsight it is pretty big, but I didn't really have a concept of size in my head (I literally googled 'Baby Quilt' and found this one). Oh well, I have a smaller, more portable crib quilt, planned for later, so maybe this one will be kept until Button is big enough for the cotbed (yes, we got a crib and a cotbed, we maybe went a bit overboard!). Or I can use it when I'm sitting with him or something (Ahhh I got all excited again, only a few weeks now!).

'Little Ark' fabric by Riley Blake Designs

I started out by sourcing this adorable fabric on Etsy, which is Noah's Ark themed by Riley Blake, who I've only just discovered, but there are so many adorable fabric lines! The fabric came from the US. Normally I would go to a fabric store and try and be a bit more frugal, but I've found it very difficult to find really good fabric stores in the UK, at least now that I'm not in Edinburgh, which is really sad. John Lewis does have a good haberdashery section, and usually has a small selection of designer fabrics (at great expense!), but being in the centre of Sheffield it's a pain to get to. So this fabric, plus the shipping cost probably ended up being as expensive as going to John Lewis, but on the other hand I wanted really cute fabric, and I fell in love with this fabric as soon as I saw it.

I got charm packs for this quilt (which probably drove up the price further) because I do not yet have a rotary cutter and mat. I really like working with charm packs and roly polies or jelly rolls and whatever other silly names these things are given, because cutting is probably the part I find the most tedious, I like to just get to the sewing! At some point I want to get a rotary cutter and mat, but scissors works well for most purposes, so until I see how much crafting I actually am capable of once I am responsible for a small person, I will hold off.

The first thing I'd say about the quilt itself is that I think I probably should have chosen a fabric more suitable to the pattern. Once I cut the 5" squares into 2.5x5" coins, the pieces that had the actual ark on them were cut up so you can't really tell. I tried to rectify it by lining up 2 of the half ark squares in the centre of the quilt, but I'm not sure it's really noticeable to anyone but me. It's still an adorable fabric, and you can still see the animals and the raindrops, and I know it's Noah's Arks, so I'm happy with it regardless. Perhaps at some point I'll get some more of this fabric to make something else, but for now this will do. Hindsight, eh?

Here's the pieces lined up to create the stacked 'coins' - 22 in each stack. I was really trying hard to plan this quilt properly so it looked really random. I realised as I was laying the pieces out that I'd cut the coins the wrong way around, so that the patterns are 'upright' when the quilt is horizontal. I even was consciously thinking about this while I was cutting and I still managed to get it wrong. Oh well, again, not really that important in the grand scheme of things, but it bothers me slightly.

Here's the top all done. This probably took me about 3-4 hours, mostly because my ironing board was in the other room, and because I realised halfway through that I'd sewn one of the strips upside down and had to undo it. I am a bit of a speedy sewer, which often leads to mistakes and things lining up poorly Fortunately this pattern didn't have to many fiddly corners to line up, so worked out well!

Here's the back. I really love the idea of putting a patchwork detail in the back (not my idea, it was in the pattern!), and I think I'm going to use this in every quilt from now on. It makes such a nice touch! I planned the back before I'd fully cut all the charm squares, so I decided to cut these coins the opposite way so that it would still look upright when the quilt was horizontal. Maybe that way it will look like I planned it that way from the beginning! Sadly one of the patches on the back will probably get cut off in a weird way depending on how the binding goes on, but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

I didn't take pictures of putting the layers together, but there's a really nice tutorial that the pattern links to (here's the links here for basting, quilting, and binding). They're really easy to follow with lots of pictures and even a video link for the quilting bit, so I definitely recommend having a look. I had a bit of a problem with this one because I have very limited floor space and my table is too small, and also being so heavily pregnant this did not make my back or pelvis feel very happy, and A was sitting on the couch watching the World Cup, alternating between saying 'Make sure you're not overdoing it, Dear!' and 'Move move you're blocking the tele!'.

I was utterly terrified of all of quilting and binding before this quilt, so much that when I made quilts back in high school and college I usually sent my quilt top and back off for a professional to do the rest. Basting seemed easy enough, but when I sent them off I just let them do the batting as well. It was VERY expensive. So knowing how to do it myself is definitely a bonus. All I needed was a darning/embroidery foot, which I got on Amazon for £5. It's a bit squeaky, but it does the job! For the batting I found a bamboo/cotton blend on Amazon, which from the reviews sounded perfect for a baby quilt, and I have not been disappointed. It's really soft, and is the perfect weight to make a baby quilt that still has lots of movement and isn't stiff, but still feels like it should be pretty warm and cozy. I have no idea what the brand is, but if you're interested, this is what I got.

I decided to do the quilting bit in stippling all over in white, as in the tutorial. Partly because it seemed fairly straightforward, and partly because it looked like I'd be very forgiving! I practiced on some scraps for a few minutes - I found I had to play with the tension a little bit to make sure both sides looked good. I probably should have practiced more, but I'm very impatient, and I also didn't have that many scraps as my fabric stash is still small.

Starting out! 

Free motion quilting was actually a lot easier than I was expecting, and I think this pattern lends itself well to the stippling because you have convenient strips to follow. I think the key is just really paying attention to where you're going so you don't go back over your lines (unless you like that look, I guess!).

After a few strips are done.

I like that the strips are slightly different in width. I think it makes it look a bit more polished on the front.

Just over half done, and I really like the effect. You can see my basting pins in the right half. I ran out of pins, so they're spaced perhaps a bit too far, but so far it hasn't been a problem!

This is as far as I've done so far with the quilting, because I ran out of thread. For some reason I thought 300m would do it. WRONG. So I went to HobbyCraft to get more thread, and would you believe they had no 100% cotton thread in white?! You'd think that would be a staple, but then again HobbyCraft has never been really great for quilting. So I ordered some online, again from Amazon, but it wont arrive until next week! :( That is basically how this blog came about. I really can't handle doing nothing.

Because I got home from the shops around 4, and I really couldn't handle just sitting around, I decided to use the time to making the binding, which because of the cutting and ironing aspect I wasn't looking forward to. It went pretty well actually,  and now I'm all ready to finish up when my thread arrives!

A longggg strip of binding.

I decided to put a very small patch of colour in the binding, I don't know if you can see it hidden in there, but I used one of the dark raindrop patterned coins and added it in. I thought it'd make it a bit more interesting since the binding is the same fabric as the back of the quilt. Again, in hindsight I think it'd have been better to use a different fabric from the binding, but partly this was a cost issue (I could only get the fabric in full metre lengths, and I had just the right amount left over), and partly this was because that was how it was done in the tutorial. It should look brilliant from the front though.

So until my new thread arrives next week, that's all for the moment. I'm working Monday to Thursday next week, so I suppose I'll probably be too exhausted to have done much work on it anyway (being a vet at 35 weeks pregnant is really tiring!). Maybe I'll jump on the 'Finish Up Friday' bandwagon and post next week if/when I've finished by then since I have that day off from work!