Frankenbatting

So I was ready to make a quilt sandwich for the Underground Railroad doll quilt when I discovered all the batting I have is either way too big to waste cutting up or just a wee bit too small. Rather than buying a crib sized quilt bat, I attached strips of batting that I'd trimmed from previous quilts to the four sides of a slightly too small piece of batting. More specifically I used a flat joining seam to sew together a Frankenbatting. MWAH HAH HAH HAAAaaaa!

How to Make a Frankenbatting

Bernina owners, turn to pages 38-39 of Mastering Your Bernina Sewing Machine (here's a link to a PDF version of the whole honkin' thing if you've lost your copy). On a Bernina 440, use stretch overlock stitch (No. 23) and presser foot No. 1.

Stretch Overlock Stitch No.
bernette 55: 10
bernette 65: 13
bernette 80e: S5
bernette 90e: S5

Bernina 1008: 11
Bernina 220: 15
Bernina 230PE: 17
Bernina 240: 19
Bernina 440QE: 23
Bernina 630: 13
Bernina 640: 13
Bernina 730: 13

If you are not blessed with a Bernina, you could use a stretch overlock stitch (if the needle were square dancing, it would take two steps forward, two steps to the right, two steps to the left, and repeat-- Do Si Do your pardner!--sorry, spring was square dancing time in my elementary school gym class). If you have a bare bones machine, a wide zig-zag will probably work just fine.
I pinned the layers of batting together just so they wouldn't get away from me. I overlapped them about 5/8 inch, but I just eyeballed it.
Be sure to keep the edge of the overlapped batting right along the inside edge of the presser foot so the stitch will sew just over the edge of the top layer on the right swing of the needle.
I didn't pin for the second row of stitching as the first row and its fuzziness kept it where it needed to be. Also, I used the mirror stitch function so I could keep the narrow side of the batting running under the arm, but if you don't have the mirror stitch function, just roll up the extra batting to move it through the arm.
The finished flat joining seam!
If you're concerned that the stitches will show through a light top or backing, you certainly could use a lighter thread color. I just happened to have gray thread in the machine. But I ran out of bobbin thread and switched to bright yellow. You can see in the picture above how a different color thread blends in much better with the batting.

No Igors were harmed in the making of this Frankenbatting.

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Underground Railroad Quilt Top

About a year ago I took a workshop with Kathleen Tracy through the Bloomington Quilters Guild of Bloomington, Indiana. The class was basically making the Underground Railroad doll quilt from Ms. Tracy's book American Doll Quilts: 16 Little Projects That Honor A Tradition. The quilts in the book are divided into the same eras as the American Girl Dolls and are sized to fit said dolls.

The class was kitted so I exerted pretty much zero creativity in the design of this quilt, which may explain why it's taken me so long to finish. Luckily my mother has a friend whose daughter is into American Girl dolls, so this quilt has an owner all lined up . . . which may explain why it didn't take even longer for me to finish.

Darjeeling Limited: Background Audtions

No, this isn't a casting call for movie extras. I'm trying to decide which of three fabrics I should use as the background to the diamond in the center medallion of my quilt inspired by Wes Anderson's film The Darjeeling Limited.

The topmost fabric is a shot cotton, which means the warp is a different color than the weft resulting (by means of optical mixing) in the viewer perceiving the fabric as a third color. It is almost impossible to capture the awesomeness of shot fabric in pictures.
The above background fabric is a print that was on INSANE sale at Material Possessions. I bought this in case the other two options I bought were too blue and insufficiently green. That is CLEARLY not the problem. And the mottling is too busy to serve as a calming backdrop for that eye-searing center diamond.
Though this picture doesn't quite do it justice, this background fabric is a VERY subtle ombre. In this picture the ombre travels from top to bottom because I just laid out the pieces I have on top of the uncut yardage. Unlike the diamond fabric, this ombre only has three changes and it only changes among three saturations of the same hue. Also each change occurs over about six inches, instead of the one inch increments in the diamond fabric. The changes only occur along either selvage edge.
I laid out one corner with the ombre parallel to the edge of the diamond, which you can barely make out in this picture. For the small area it would have to cover, the ombre is too large to see all three color changes. Also the color change is so subtle it is almost imperceptible in this small space. I think I'm going to save this ombre for a larger area where I can really make the most of it.

The winner is: shot cotton (the top photo). Thank you for letting me work through this with you.

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C&T Publishing Love

I just have to share with you my completely disproportionate glee that Megan Wisniewski over at C&T Publishing's blog linked to my post about Katie Pasquini Masopust's workshop.

Imagine me holding a bouquet of fat quarters in the bend of my elbow as I regally wave (elbow, elbow, wrist, wrist) and cry like the prom queen I never was . . . because that's what I'm doing right now. Thank you!

Darjeeling Limited: Center Medallion

This is the story of how I translated my inspiration - the Wes Anderson film The Darjeeling Limited - into a quilt. At least, it's a chapter in that story. I started by watching the film with my trusty notebook in hand. When I saw images that I was particularly inspired by, I hit the pause button on the DVD player and sketched. As you can see on the example above, I noted color placement and color scheme. Occasionally I noted the subject matter. In this case I believe it was one of many designs painted on the side of a white bus that comes to pick up the main characters at Dhelana.
Once I had settled on the idea that this diamond would be the center of a medallion quilt, I sketched it again filling in possible colors with colored pencil. More important that the color, this sketch helped me determine the proportions of the diamond.
Theoretically, one could strip piece the center diamond out of a set of solid colors ranging from red-orange to yellow. But when I originally saw the diamond in the film it reminded me of some of the amazing ombre fabrics available. I had been looking for an opportunity to work with ombre for awhile. I knew I'd need at least four repeats to get the four long edges of the diamond. I bought a half yard, figuring the sides of my diamond wouldn't be any larger than 18 inches (using the Pythagorean Theorem I figured if the longer center line of the diamond were 32 inches, and the shorter center line were 16 inches, that would make the sides about 17.89 inches - but don't let the math worry you).
From the reddest stripe to the yellowest stripe was 5 inches. Since I want the entire yellowest stripe to show along the outside of the diamond and I want the entire reddest stripe to show at the center of the diamond, I could have figured out the size of the right triangle I'd need for the template using a lot of geometry I've mostly forgotten.
Instead I made a right triangle out of scrap paper that was larger than what I would need, but the correct proportions (the short leg half as long as the long leg). I lined up the right angle to where I wanted the finished inside corner to land: so the whole reddest line would show. Then I lined up the hypotenuse parallel to the lines of the ombre. I lay my trusty clear ruler down along the edge of the yellowest line and marked the paper. I cut the paper template along that line. The resulting paper template was the exact finished size of the right triangles I need to assemble to make my diamond. Look Mom, No Math!
Next I broke out my handy translucent template plastic. I put it on top of the paper template. Using my trusty transparent ruler which is marked off in quarter inch increments, I drew lines exactly a quarter inch outside the paper template. I cut the template plastic out along those lines. Then, using a 0.1 Pigma marker I used my ruler to mark lines on the template a quarter inch from each edge and extended to the end along the hypotenuse. This allows me to line up the template along the ombre and know I'm going to get the whole reddest line and the whole yellowest line in my finished piece.
Usually when you use templates you flip them over and trace them onto the back of the fabric. But the ombre print on this fabric wasn't visible from the back, so I marked on the top of the fabric. This is no big deal so long as you don't let your pen lift up your template and jog across your finished sewing area. I used a green Ultra Fine Point Sharpie to make a visible line on this eye-glazing fabric. For the diamond, it's important to remember to trace two triangles in one direction, flip the template, and trace two triangles in the other direction.
I used my super-sharp Gingher scissors of doom to cut along the marked lines. Here you can see what I mean about two triangles in one direction and two triangles in the other direction.
Here are the pieces of the central diamond laid out and ready to go!

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Pachyderm Parade

I am working on a much longer update about my Darjeeling Limited inspired quilt. Meanwhile I thought I'd share a parade of pachyderms which I fussy cut from a scattered print of elephants (discussed here) and sewed together into four borders.

Baby Quilts

Thusfar in my quilting career the vast majority of the quilts I've made have been in celebration of the birth of a baby. The following are a few thoughts on baby quilts, especially how their function determines my design and construction decisions including size, shape, backing fabric, fabric color, fabric preparation, washing and drying finished quilts, machine or hand sewing, and the subject matter of prints.

I think of baby quilts as utilitarian art. So the primary questions I ask myself when I design my baby quilts is what will this really be used for. One possible use, especially if your quilt will arrive between birth and about three months: swaddling. I've heard the optimal size for a swaddling blanket for up to a pudgy three month old is at least 42 inches square. I've also heard that square is the optimal shape for swaddling. For more on swaddling, check out Dr. Harvey Karp's The Happiest Baby on the Block: The New Way to Calm Crying and Help Your Newborn Baby Sleep Longer. With this in mind, most of the baby quilts I've made have been square rather than rectangular. Looking back, it seems the trend is for the quilts I finish closer to birth to be square and quilts I kinda knew from the start I wouldn't finish until after the swaddling stage were more likely to be rectangular.

Another possible use to which a baby quilt might be put: play mat. Either parents are getting weird about letting their progeny play on the floor or the infant industrial complex has perpetuated some parental paranoia about the evils of flooring such that they can market nonsense like pack-n-plays. Regardless, the end result is Junior needs something between him and the floor. Your quilt will likely be it. So I like to make the back out of a durable fabric with a print that will hide dirt.

Short of a wall hanging (and even then, not near the changing table), the use to which a baby quilt might be put will invariably lead to stains and dirtiness. This leads me to my almost compulsive paranoia about using fabric with large areas of white in quilts for kids, which I've previously discussed in the comments to my post about selecting fabric for a particular baby quilt. I feel like any white will show every stain or speck of dirt that will inevitably be part of a baby quilt's life. I'd hate to give a parent something that they would feel guilty using for its intended purpose. I've even contemplated overdying fabric that is really awesome, but too white, in my opinion, for a baby quilt. In fact, one of the reasons I laid off a pretty intense '30's reproduction fabric collecting habit was because of the prevalence of white backgrounds, particularly in kid-themed prints.

Along with getting dirty, I assume all the baby quilts I make will be machine washed, probably with hot water and detergent, and then thrown in the dryer. So I prewash all of my fabric for baby quilts with hot water and detergent on high agitation. Then when I'm done with the quilt, I wash it again in hot water with detergent and I even throw it in the dryer to dry it. I can wax poetic about the importance of prewashing any fabric for WAY too long. But I prewash baby quilt fabrics on hot to shrink them and with high agitation test their durability. If they're not going to survive less than an hour in a washing machine, they're not going to survive the first day with a baby. I wash the quilt again when I'm done partially to get out all the schmutz with which the quiltmaking process endows its subject. But in the case of a baby quilt it's also to test my stitches, particularly to binding, to make sure there aren't any weak points that need to be reinforced.

Which leads me to another point, while I have hand appliqued and hand quilted portions of baby quilts in the past, now I only machine piece, applique, and quilt baby quilts. Hand stitches are too easy for little fingers to pop. And, more annoyingly, in my experience, when a parent realizes you made the quilt literally by hand, they wrap it in archival paper, place it carefully in an archival box, and gently tuck it into the topmost corner of the topmost shelf of the least used closet in the house. Then they forget about it and wonder why you were so rude as to not give their baby a present. OK, that only happened once and I'm not going to name names, but I really should NOT have been surprised. But now when I give away a baby quilt I emphasize not all the work I put into it, but how durable it is. I tell them I already machine washed it on hot with detergent and ran in through the dryer so they shouldn't be afraid to treat it the same way. Somehow arming them with this knowledge frees them to actually let their kid touch the quilt.

Recounting that nightmare story about the handmade quilt, which I'm pretty sure the kid never even laid eyes on, reminds me of another story of neurotic parents who have changed my approach to baby quilts. Again, I don't want to be too detailed because someone someday might figure out who I'm talking about and I really do love these folks even if, or perhaps because, they're nuts. As I was at the design wall stage of making a baby quilt for boy, I got the word that the parents were adamant that everything for said baby be extremely masculine, including the colors of everything this kid might ever see. Well, the quilt I was working on was a scrappy, '30's Repro, one-patch which I had painstakingly arranged on my design wall in diagonal rows in sort of, well, a rainbow pattern. First, I had to pull all the pinks and lavenders. Next, I had to pull all the prints with flowers and girls. Then, I had my husband, who is not the macho-est man but can pass in a pinch, to look through the remaining patches for anything that might be construed as "feminine." Mind you, I was working from a few charm packs, so it's not like I had unlimited options. Well, by the time we'd done our butch best, the one-patch center had shrunk significantly and the borders grew a few inches wider all around. And the one-patch arrangement become randomly arranged rather than by color. Now I'm waiting for a very girly girlfriend to have a girl so I can use up all my '30's repro pink, lavender, and femme themed prints. So with that in mind, I now ask parents what the color scheme of the baby's room is going to be. This is a pretty subtle way to see which way they're leaning on the whole "gender stereotypes in infant interior design" spectrum. And if I don't know or can't get a straight (pardon the pun) answer, I go with green and yellow abstract prints.

Now that I've shared my "rules" for baby quilts, I'm sure all of the baby quilts I blog about will break every one. Isn't that what rules are for?

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