#13 C. Quilt

#13 - Pick out material and make crib skirt, crib bumper, and quilt myself.

Another task complete.

My First Quilt !!! I'm thrilled that it turned out nice. I still can't believe I actually made a quilt!

Here it is...Ladybug's Quilt

Making this quilt was actually a struggle for me. Frustrating and very tiring. It only took me two days to make this quilt but it was a struggle. I learned a lot throughout this experience and hope to make another.


I used this tutorial from Cluck Cluck Sew to make the quilt top.

Many Many Mistakes and lessons learned :

The tutorial used a "charm pack". I did not. I purchased about 8 different print materials and decided to cut the squares myself. WOW. This took me forever! I got about half way done and decided next time I make a quilt using squares this small I am buying a charm pack! I had to cut 160 squares all together.

lesson #1: Purchase a charm pack!

Another mistake I made during the making of this quilt was not back stitching. When I proceeded to sew all of my squares into strips, I kept noticing little holes throughout the squares. This became frustrating as I noticed this at least 12 times. 

lesson #2: Back stitch !!

Another mistake I made...I didn't use enough prints. How do I explain...The charm pack used in the tutorial was made up of 80 strips originally. She then cut each strip in half creating 160 squares. So all-in-all there were only 2 matching squares throughout the entire quilt. I had 20 of each print in my quilt. This made "mixing up" the squares much more difficult. I kept running into the same problem over and over and over again. I went to lay out all of my strips and kept noticing that the one square was touching a square of the same pattern. I didn't know what to do. I called Kale in. He became my quilting expert! He did the best he could to lay my quilt out in a way so that hopefully a square of one pattern wasn't touching another square of the same pattern.

lesson #3: Use a larger variety of prints to create a small square quilt

Kale also labeled each strip with a fabric marker before I started sewing them together. This would ensure that I didn't mix them up again.

The top quilt was finally complete and I was able to go to bed! We were both exhausted.

For the 'sandwich part of this quilt I decided to use a fusible batting. This made sewing the bottom of my quilt to the top much easier. I didn't have to use pins to secure if I didn't want to. Of course I did being that it was my first quilt. I didn't read this on the Internet or tutorial, I just went shopping for the batting and sew the word fusible. I immediately thought hmmm sounds easy enough! So that's what I went with. I sandwiched my quilt together and used this tutorial to finish the border and completed my first front to back miter corner!!

This was frustrating and exhausting but the experience was well worth it. I learned a lot from making this quilt. I am excited that it is complete and I am ready to move on to the crib bumper. I am hoping to take some lessons learned from this project into the next.