Baby Boy Zigzag Batik Quilt

 

 

Baby Boy Batik Zigzag Quilt

As always there seems to be soooo much to do and not enough time to get it all done! I actually finished this lovely baby boy batik zigzag quilt well over a month ago, but with so much going on with uni and the rest of my crazy life I haven't had a chance to add it to my blog until now. I've been feeling guilty about not being more consistent with this blog. Even though I still try to sew every spare moment that  I have (and spend the rest of my time wishing that I had more time to sew!).

As you already know this was originally intended to be a Chevron quilt, but in my haste to get the first quilt done I misread the online instructions. Since this is the matching boy quilt to the girl quilt I did earlier...I've decided to make it the same way.

The fabrics used in this quilt top were an off white homespun (I really should have been a bit clever here and purchased enough of the one batch of white homespun when I started to make the first zigzag quilt, so as to save myself some time and money...oh well, live and learn!).

The batik fabrics I purchased from Sewers Delight in Browns Plains, as they have a new app called Collect where I can collect points and not have another bulky plastic card in my purse. So due to my bargain hunting instincts and the fact that they are close to me,  I thought that I'd check out their range of batiks and there was enough of a selection to keep me going for this quilt without having to track down more colours and designs. The backing is a navy homespun. There are some fabrics from this quilt that I have used in the baby girl batik quilt which was intentional.

I prewash all of my fabrics individually or in groups of very similar colours, I strongly suggest that everyone do the same. This stops you spending so much time on a project that may end up having a colour run later or shrinking and/or  stretching a little and pulling at stitches  making your finished work uneven.

I cut my fabric into 2.5 inch strips and sewed them together. I then cut them into 4.5 inch blocks. I laid out the blocks in a line on the kitchen table and decided which order to place the colours. Once I had a colour scheme I was happy with I sewed together my first row. I then laid out the other rows in the order that I wished to sew them. Once the rows were sewed up, it was just a matter of pressing the rows lightly with an iron and lining up the colours in the order required. At this stage the quilt top seems to come together very quickly.

I almost didn't put a boarder on this quilt. But then I would have had to trim it up a bit shorter on the sides than what I think 'looks right', so I used the batiks that I had left over to make a boarder.

As usual I used the 505 spray to baste the quilt. I left this to set for a few days (this is just something that I do, as I find that otherwise the machine needle gets gummed up).

This quilt has cotton batting, which I have purchased pre-cut and bagged for convenience. The binding is the same fabric as the purple batik that I used for the baby girl batik zigzag quilt.

When I machine quilted this quilt I used variegated thread and used a free motion sewing foot in my own random stippling style.

It seems that every time I finish one baby quilt I hear that another little bundle of joy is on its way. Baby quilts are so satisfying and fun to make, I'm sure I'll have more baby quilts to show you soon.

Baby Owl Quilt

 

Baby Owl Quilt





Here’s another baby quilt that I’ve made for a friend of mine who has had a bub, and there will be plenty more baby quilts to come…as more and more family and friends are having babies! I only hope that I can keep up! As I’m studying full time, have my own very hyper little guy to chase around and am looking for part time or casual work that suits my already hectic life.  As much as I’d love to sit and quilt all day, every day… I don’t have that opportunity. Maybe if I could get some more followers for this blog, or started making some money from this blog I could justify it?

 

The feature squares came all cut up and ready to go in the form of a Charm Pack called Ten Little Things by Moda.  I purchased these at the Craft and Stiches Expo I attended in March 2013. I used most of the squares in the charm pack.

I’m not a fan of the rickrack edges to the pre-cut squares. So other than the other pre-cut quilt that I’ve already purchased (and will hopefully feature soon as its own blog post) I won’t be purchasing anymore. It just becomes a little trickier to make sure that the seam allowance is even, and can throw out the look of the quilt.

This quilt measures 37in x 43.5in or 95cms x 111cms. I’ve used cotton wadding which was purchased pre-cut and bagged at Spotlight. Love that stuff!!

For the boarders on the quilt top I’ve used a dark navy blue homespun, which I wasn’t too sure of when I first laid out the squares. I actually thought that it might be too dark. But it seems to make the squares ‘pop’. So I didn’t end up changing it.

 

For the backing fabric I’ve used an aqua blue/green homespun fabric. Which now I wish I’d gotten more of, as it really is a lovely shade and my pictures just don’t do it justice!! For the edging or the binding I’ve used a dark navy and white polka dot print, which I had just enough left over from when I made my brother a Man sized French Braid quilt. The navy and polka dot print was the backing fabric on his quilt.  

 The threads that I used for this were the same variegated threads that I used for my own Hectic Eclectic Quilt. For the top of the quilt it was the various blues variegated thread and for the backing it was the blue, green and yellow variegated thread. I’m lucky that I had enough left over to quilt this quilt too! Quilting is all about recycling they say…so I’m glad that I can actually find the odd project here and there where I can reuse the same threads and fabrics. Also it saves me from having to run out and try to find something that will go with the quilt that I’m trying to make. Especially when I’ve already taken longer than I would like to make the quilt!

 

 

I’ve machine quilted this in the stripling style, and even though I’m pretty new to machine quilting I think that it turned out pretty good.  

Baby batik quilt as you go...

Baby batik quilt as you go...

Is it a boy? Or is it a girl? A simple enough question one would have thought in this day and age. But, believe it or not, there are still parents who don’t want to shout this tidbit of information out to the world. Well not until the moment bub is here and everyone can see for themselves.  And rightly so! A little mystery never hurt anyone, and half of the fun is in the guessing!

Bets have been made, and though we’ve all been trying our hardest, the parents still won’t even let a clue slip.

 

Mum to be has come up with a clever idea while we all place our bets and take our guesses. Why not make a quilt that could go either way? After all, there is a 50/50 chance. So I’ve designed a quilt that’s half suited for a boy, or half suited for a girl. How clever of the mum to be to keep us all guessing!

I’ve designed this quilt with bright batik fabrics. One side is strips of pinks framed in a yellow floral batik. The other side is strips of blue batiks. The quilt is then bound in a delightful green batik fabric. Before starting this project I washed all of the batik fabrics used.

 

First I pieced together the pink side. I sewed the 20cm strips of pink batiks together and then decided that I needed to frame them to make that quilt side measure up. So I used the yellow floral batik to make a boarder around the pink strips.

 

I then basted this pink quilt top to the cotton batting (which I purchased from Lindcraft and was originally 50x60 inches). Then after trimming the excess batting from the basted top I used the quilt as you go method of both quilting the quilt and sewing the blue strip side simultaneously.

 

The pink striped side goes one direction, while the blue side goes another. This is so that there isn’t too much resistance when trying to ‘quilt as you go’. As I’d never used the ‘quilt as you go’ method before, I watched a few tutorials on YouTube before attempting this. The one that I found to be the most helpful was from the Missouri Star Quilt Company. How did we ever get by before we could YouTube or Google things that we didn’t know?

As an extra bit of security, and also as this is a quilt intended for a baby and likely to get washed more, I decided to also quilt through half of the blue strip.

 

As always when a project is a gift that needs to be finished by a deadline, almost everything that can go awry will…

At one stage of the quilting my thread kept breaking even after checking my sewing machine manual. After using some very colourful language and fighting the urge to run over the sewing machine with my car, I checked a few online noticeboards to see what others had done in the same situation and hoped that my machine wouldn’t need a service (well not until I’d completed  this project). As per my research I changed the needle and re threaded again (even though I’d done so recently, I discovered that sewing with batiks needed a larger sized needle) I  hoped that it would work and stop the constant thread breakage, and it did.

 

The thread that I originally purchased with this project in mind was also completely unsuitable, so back to the sewing supply store I went. For the quilt as you go method I ended up reusing the same blue variegated thread that I used in my Hectic Eclectic quilt. The pink variegated thread (which I’d purchased from Spotlight) was too thick and kept coming through on the blue side of the work (and I suspect also played its part in the whole thread breaking debacle). So a new thinner pink variegated thread was purchased last minute from Stumer's Sewing Centre. The variegated pink thread blends in with the batiks instead of standing out like it would on a different quilt.

For the binding the green thread that I’d originally wanted to use was ridiculously bright, so I quickly unpicked this and decided to also use the same green variegated thread that I used for the Hectic Eclectic quilt.

The seam that I had to unpick left some needle marks in the delicate batik fabric, so I’m glad that I didn’t make more mistakes!

 

I ended up buying two more blue panels of batik fabric than what I originally anticipated. These were the darker two panels that are at each end of the blue side. Which I thought helped to balance out the blue side, as before it looked like it was all the same colour (instead of different panels) when I laid out the fabrics and looked at them from a distance. These were purchased from the Patchwork Tree at Alderley. The rest of the batik fabrics were purchased from Quilt Essentials at Eaton’s Hill. The 20cm strips are the minimum cut from these quilting stores and suited my purpose completely as I didn’t want strips that were too thin and would make the work difficult to quilt through.

 

When I make my binding I always refer back to a book I bought when I wanted to get some ideas on how to use up some of the scrap fabrics that I’d begun to accumulate in my quilting adventures.
 
For me there are a lot of firsts wrapped up in this quilt. This quilt is the first that I’ve made for a baby, the first I’ve made for my godchild, the first that I’ve made entirely from batik fabrics, the first that I’ve machine sewn the entire binding on and the first quilt that I’ve ‘quilted as I went’.

 

The end result is a stunning bright baby quilt that I’m glad that I made myself finish before bub arrived. (Otherwise like most of my quilt projects it may lay half-finished in my pile of UFOs for who knows how long?).

I’m now tempted to make myself a bright double sided quilt in beautiful batik fabric strips. I will be strong and hold off on that idea for the moment, well at least until I have fully quilted some of the quilts that I’ve already started.

Now my part is done…all that’s needed now is a newborn to wrap up in the quilt!