Super Blocks

I have been working on a quilt for my sister for over 6 months now, luckily the baby is only a few months old so I'm not THAT far behind.

I have only made a few quilts in my history of sewing and this one made me feel like I was really quilting and not just tying.

My sister is delicate, lovely, girly and her new babe would be too so I had to make an appropriate blanket to match. I get excited about fabric, but I never felt like this before with any other project. Am I professing my love to fabric here or what? When I bought my new machine the guy selling it to me was like, "how do you feel about fabric, do you get inspired by fabric?" I thought he was a little over the top, but then I had this quilt experience so I guess I did slightly have an affair with doll fabric. You will agree with me in a minute.

I took a visit to AZ while I was making the iMaxi and went to a few fabric stores. I already had these two fabrics so I needed a few more to go along...

this fabric was from my fancy quilting store so it's nice and durable and the most adorable vintage print of little red riding hood, goldilocks and the three bears. They also had ...

these paper doll girls. Oh, how adorable right? I thought they looked just like me and Annie. If you know our family we all have different color hair, light brown, dark brown, blond and red.

But then, oh but then in Arizona I found Strawberry Shortcake and Raggedy Ann. PERFECT!!! I found my fabrics and I was ready to go.

I got this great book at a book fair selling old library books and saw the pattern for the blocks. I talked to several quilters and they all suggested that I NOT start with this quilt, not exactly a beginners quilt. Well, don't tell me what to do. I figured if I sew and cut straight it wouldn't be that hard.

Well, I always have to make things more complicated so I add not only different fabrics to the mix but different textures and thicknesses...

So the different piles made it difficult but what was weird is to make this design you can't sew all the way to the end. You sew 1/4 of an inch from the beginning and then stop 1/4 of an inch from the end. Anyway, it was complicated to piece to say the least. Annie said that she was only going to have 2 kids, I might only need to do this once so difficult was okay. Now if she decides to have another I will be thrilled, but they might get a more crappy gift.

Okay you do this in cubes first then sew the cubes to each other.

At this point I was afraid it was going to be too hard so I made a mini version to see if I could actually do it. This worked out great, not only did it allow me to practice but I made a small doll quilt for her in the process. I top stitched it in red, which didn't look that great so I did the bigger quilt in white and it looked better. For that reason alone I'm glad I had a practice quilt.

In the beginning she said she wanted red, she was being nice and said just use your leftover iMaxi fabric of which I had a crap load of red. Then I thought red and ivory would be pretty, but then the fabrics had pink so i added pink...BUT then I needed one more color. I really like red and purple together, but knew this was a bit too much to use all over so I just added a few accent pieces and really liked how it tied it all together. It also matched the Raggedy Ann material so it all worked out.

I made it almost too big to put through my sewing machine, stitching the top turned out to be more difficult. I made it harder than it needed to be. You apparently stitch in the ditch to top stitch and I went about it a little hap hazardly when hindsight there was a much easier way. I just didn't want to overlap my stitches so I had to stitch a section then turn it over and see where I missed. It took forever and (Annie don't read this part) I caught the backing a few times so it doesn't look that great from behind. Blerg, so if we're talking about mistakes the corners looked really crappy so I put fuzzy corners over my mistakes.

My photos for this project are horrible and I took this one on a dark day and was going to retake it the next day but it also was cloudy. Anyway, I had waited too long to make it I had to get it in the mail so it went off without being properly photographed. Oh, and then I did stitch Audrey Anne into the corner. Hopefully Annie will take a few photos of the cute lady on her new blanket.