Three quilts for Charity

 

These quilts are ready to go and when my kids are not sick we are going over to our local women's shelter to deliver them with a card talking about how quilts are like love.  Here is the card I made.  It turned out pretty cute.

 

 

 

I think I started some of these quilts 2 or 3 years ago.  They have been a challenge in the fact that I was trying new techniques that I was not used to.  So let me tell you a little bit about these quilts.

 

The light green one was an experiment.  I think I bought the fabric over 5 years ago.  Then a couple years ago when we were making quilts for a Relief Society project I think I started it.  I wanted to try making blocks on a quilt.  The fabric is from my grandmother's stash.  After she died I was able to gather some of the fabric in hopes that one day I would make quilts like grandma.  Maybe one day I will but for now I am an amateur.  After piecing the top together I experimented with a quilting technique.  I was trying to use many of the fancy stitches on my machine and just played around with it.  I decided to do some free motion quilting but I didn't like doing it with my machine.  And so there it set for a couple years waiting for me to finish.  Finally I decided it needed to be done and so I figured out that Kirsten's sewing machine has a free motion foot and it fits on my machine.  So I was able to free motion the squares that were green.  It turned out okay.  I have a long way to go on my free motion quilting but it is kind of cute and has a unique look to it.  I added a premade binding and it turned out okay.

 

 

For these two quilts I used a couple different techniques.  I sometimes watch the show Fon's and Porter on PBS.  I love the idea of making a quilt but lack the confidence to do more then very simple quilts.  Years ago I used a technique from the Bend the Rules sewing Book and made a couple lap quilts by piecing together strips.  But as I was watching the show Fon's and Porter I saw them demonstrate a quilt made on the serger.  The Serger Ruffle Quilt seemed a fairly easy way to make a quilt and so I thought I would make these quilts into that.  It is fairly straight forward but I found there were a couple problems with quilting with the serger.  Mainly that you are going over 6 layers of fabric and batting.  My machine did it fine but I found that sometimes I would not catch one layer.

 

 

So I ended up having to modify how I did it.  After I would serge one layer I would have to cut the layers to match up all three layers before adding the next layer. 

 

 

I then would move the new piece on top over about a 1/4 of an inch to insure that it would get sewn into the seam.  After that I picked up all of the fabric into the seam and didn't have problems. 

 

 It took a little longer then I expected but they turned out pretty and cute.  Of course I love the pink and purple one but the purple and green one has grown on me. 

For binding the quilt I found a tutorial that showed you how to bind it all on the sewing machine. The tutorial is here Quilt Binding tutorial.  That saved me hours of time that I would have to sew it by hand.  I think it turned out pretty nice too.
I found somewhere where someone had wound their binding onto an old thread spool.

  I liked the idea and I was even able to put it on my second thread holder while I was adding it to the quilt.  It moved smoothly and made it easy to put on.  Just one of those things that made the binding part easier.  I cut all my binding from scraps.  I like using scraps for binding, it adds color and fun to the binding.

Hope you enjoy and I hope those at the shelter can feel the love I put in to these blankets.