Main Fabric: Rhapsody by Sedef Imer (Riley Blake)

Filler Fabric: Emma Louise Vanilla

Backing Fabric: At Home Bicycle Time Cotton Quilting Fabric (Bernatex) & Emma Louise Vanilla

Free-motion Quilting: Straight stitches along block seams

This project came to be because my husband asked me if I could make a baby quilt for his cycling friend who is expecting in December this year. The wife hates cycling but my husband wanted it to be cycling themed so I compromised in favour of the wife and only the backing has anything bike related 😝 Cute bikes too. It somehow matched perfectly with the Rhapsody charm pack I’ve had for a while. My original plan was to design Pikmin themed cushions but after the Ace Attorney cushions I don’t think I’ll be needing any more cushions for a while LOL.

I’ve recently been saving the free quilting patterns I’ve been bookmarking, as part of my Chrome tab clean-out. And one that I’ve been thinking would make a good baby quilt was Precious by Happy Quilting Melissa. I redesigned it a bit to use as much of the charm squares as possible while also making it square. I’m quite pleased with my adjustments in the corner blocks 😁 I only have one square spare which I think is a pretty good result for a quilt design that doesn’t just use one square per block.

I used my AccuFeed 1/4 inch foot and it really is so much better than the default. I also got to use my felt design board and it really is so good for arranging the blocks ‘strategically randomly’. Although transferring it from the board to my sewing machine meant that I often ended up messing up the order because I lost track of what went where and so to help me a little bit, I printed out the design, numbered the rows and crossed them off as I went. This way I could tell at least which way the blocks (particularly the 4 patch ones) were meant to go which meant I had a greater chance of keeping things in order.

I also made sure to square off each block at each stage, including at the beginning to remove the ‘tips’ of the pinked edges. Because those pinked edges always mess me up when I’m aligning sides. I think it helped a bit. Only the very first block I did was terribly off/smaller than the 4.5 x 4.5 inch size it was meant to be.

Since I had a deadline (the baby shower), I decided not to go fancy with the quilting or the binding. The hard part though was aligning the top and backing so that the ‘feature’ bike fabric on the backing was centred. My approach was to trim the batting to the backing and then do my best to align the top so that it was centred. I think I did a pretty good job. Thinking about it, my choice of quilting (grid lines) would have made this look sooo bad if I hadn’t gotten it pretty right hahaha.

I’m so used to doing quite dense free-motion quilting I was starting to get some anxiety about if my planned quilting was going to be enough. So I looked up how far apart I can quilt for this type of bamboo batting and it turns out it’s 20cm?! That’s heaps. My lines were about 9cm apart so should be fine. I am conscious that as a baby quilt it will probably be washed a lot, but I think it should be ok.

I still haven’t figured out how to wind a bobbin with my water soluble thread (for the Sew Precise Sew Fast Binding method) and I was feeling a bit stressed because I had a deadline, so just did my binding normally. And I realised that I’ve been cutting my binding 2 1/4inch wide based on the instructions from By Annie when I made a case using the Soft and Stable, but I realised that I don’t need to make it that wide for quilts because the batting is no where near as thick as double stacked Soft and Stable. 2 inch will probably do the trick. But wider is better than not wide enough which is usually what has happened in the past. I hand sewed the binding down with the water soluble thread and then had to wait for matching pink thread to arrive so I could secure it with machine stitching. I first tried sewing from the back but my stitching ended up going over the bias so did it from the front on the binding itself. But this meant so much of the bias was left hanging on the back so I did another line of stitching in the ditch. This was better but some parts are still quite free. Not enough to be an issue in my opinion, but yeah, I really should look into the Sew Precise Sew Fast method. I’m thinking maybe I need to get myself a bobbin winder so I can overcome my water soluble and fusible thread bobbin winding issues.

Since I used water soluble thread for both basting the quilt sandwich and the binding, I gave it a prewash and dry. Which gives it that nice rustic look haha. And bonus, when folded up the quilt fits perfectly into the gift bag we bought for it.

I’m pretty happy with it considering it was a bit of a rush job. The pattern is cute and nice and cheerful with the fabric used. And the back is nice and neat/aligned which makes me happy.

Categories: Quilting

hikaru