My First Quilt

As a garment sewist, I’ve had little interest in quilting, except to admire the work that goes into them, and admiring all the pretty quilting cottons. I always thought, “I’ll never be quilter, that’s just not me.” Hah! Famous last words… 🙂

I’ve been working towards remove toxins from my life, which I guess got kicked into high gear four or five years ago when it was found that I have food allergies. Eliminating all wheat, dairy, and soy products in my life felt kind of overwhelming at first. Reading labels on everything can be rather eye opening. They put wheat in chicken salad? In vitamins, shampoo, and body care products? I knew it was in obvious places like bread, baked goods, pancake mix, and tortillas, but the other ones kind of surprised me. And don’t even get me started on all the things that they add soy, soy protein, and soybean oil to. Let’s just say that there are very, very few condiments that I’ll buy. Let me know if you’re interested in a post or two about food allergies, what I eat, recipes, what brands I trust, etc., and I’ll be happy to oblige.

There is a point to me talking about food allergies, in that it has led me to cleaning up many things in life, not just food. I’ve switched over to natural and toxin-free skin care products and deodorant. I’ve started making some more clothing out of cotton wovens. So I decided it was time to ditch my favorite fuzzy blanket, and use cotton. I bought a cotton waffle weave blanket, but honestly, it wasn’t soft at all, and felt rather scratchy. Then I remembered the quilts my Great Grandmother used to make, how soft and cozy they were, and decided to make a quilt.

See the pale purple ditsy floral? That is the scrap fabric from my daughter’s first birthday dress and bloomers. Note that my daughter is in her mid-thirties, and I now have granddaughters!

My hold up with quilts is that I don’t care for traditional design. At all. My taste leans contemporary, yet comfortable. So this was definitely not going to be a traditional patchwork, hexie, or english paper piecing sort of thing. I wanted something simple, with clean lines. So I dove into my stash and pulled out all the solids.

Peep the two Tula Pink prints: “Forbidden Fruit Snacks” and I can’t recall the name of the tiny scrap of the dragonfly print. I used those fabrics (at different times) to make matching dresses for my granddaughters. The girls loved the fruit snack dresses, and literally squeezed themselves into them until they were snug and far too short. Not a big deal really since they wear shorts under their dresses.

I decided to piece the solids together to make simple rectangles, and used narrow strips of printed fabrics in between the solids. I think the strips were 2″ high. Except for the Tula Pink dragonfly print, because I had such tiny scraps of that to work with. The solids were arranged in somewhat of a rainbow of the colors in my little chunk of the color wheel, ranging from green, through turquoise and blue, and down to purple. I used prints to tie the colors above and below it together.

The light blue batik with the silvery dots (between the two blues) is made of scraps from my eldest granddaughters second birthday dress. The darker blue batik with circles was from the handwarmer scarves I made for my Mom, sisters, and sister-in-law a few years back. The greenish turquoise with white dots was from the pillowcases I made for the microwavable rice pillows I made them the year after that.

Lest you think that only the prints hold memories of things I’ve made for the people I love, about half of the solids were from the matching rainbow dresses I made the girls for Lila’s fifth birthday.

I’m not into traditional quilt labels, but I did want to “sign my work”. I used the lettering capabilities of my Bernina to add my name and the year to the bottom right hand corner of the quilt. I used matching (or rather, only slightly darker than the fabric) thread for a subtle look. If it’s a bit too subtle to read on the wrinkly quilted surface, it says Debora 2025, since I made it at the end of last year.

Piecing and quilting was done on my Bernina 790 Plus. The large throat space made it more than easy enough to wrangle the quilt through. I didn’t feel like hooping and using the embroidery module to quilt it. That just seemed like too much for something that was supposed to be a simple quilt. So I just used a bunch of different decorative stitches to straight line quilt it, with the lines spaced 2″ apart.

Each printed strip was “stitched in the ditch”, and each solid color section has a different decorative stitch.

I used the dark purple for the binding, which was made from 2-1/2″ strips. Since I literally knew nothing about making quilts other than that you pieced with a 1/4″ seam allowance, and needed batting and a backing for your quilt, and that you needed to do some sort of quilting to hold everything together, I watched a couple of videos on making a quilt sandwich, straight or serpentine line quilting, and attaching binding.

I bought this pretty batik when my local quilt shop was going out of business. I was sad to see them go, as it was the store (at their old location) that I bought both my Babylock serger and Bernina sewing machine from. It was also were I had purchased all the pretty Tula Pink fabrics I’ve used to make dresses for myself and the girls.

I used Warm and Natural 100% cotton batting, and various colors of Guttermann thread, as I tried to match the thread to each of the solid colors, using turquoise in the bobbin, to match the backing. The finished quilt is around 50″ wide (though it started out at 52″). I lost a bit of width when I “squared up” the quilt before binding, by 76″ long. It is the perfect size to wrap up in while drinking my morning coffee and snuggling the cat.

I’m an early riser, so it’s generally still dark when I’m drinking my coffee. But my husband managed to catch a photo of me when it was light enough outside.

The cat loves the quilt as much as I do. It’s soft and cozy, and has only grown softer with each washing. It’s not a fancy quilt, just a very simple basic design that serves its purpose. The colors make me happy, and the scraps of fabrics used remind me of the people I love and previously made things for.

You know what else it did? It opened my mind to giving quilting a try. Am I going to turn into someone who makes quilts using EPP, or a flying geese design? Extremely unlikely! However, there are plenty of modern quilt designs out there if I don’t want to just make up my own. And as you may have guessed by the fun tertiary colors and scraps I used, I’m a big fan of Tula Pink designed fabric. So much so that I’ll share the secret that I’ve already completed my second quilt, and purchased fabric for a third!

I’ll have to figure out a system to get some photos of the second quilt, as it is larger than this one. But I look forward to sharing it in the next month or so, because it’s much fancier than this one!

So, don’t be afraid to try something new. Even if you think it’ll never be for you, trying it in a simple or different way, in colors that you love, may be the start of a new passion! Thank you for reading and sharing my love of sewing, fabric, color, and trying new things.

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