LEARNING TO QUILT

I've been making flannel baby blankets and burp cloths for 17 years now.  My first blanket however, was for my nephew in 1991 when I was just finishing up High School.  It was a tied blanket made with two pieces of fabric... no piecing.  The batting was lumpy, the binding was... well... there, and the ties were uneven.

I don't think I ever made a niece or nephew a blanket like that again.

Then in college I made some quilt tops, but they were all just giant squares pieced together.  They were all tied quilts and connected to the back envelope style with no binding.  Binding has always scared me.  I have made my daughter several quilts for her bed but they too have all been tied and are either in large squares or big strip quilts.

I made this cute picnic blanket one year that was a watermelon design on one side and then a variegated green on the other side.  It was tied with black yarn.  I intended to learn how to bind a quilt and even bought the binding.  But some 5+ years later it still had the batting sticking out... but we used it that way.

One day my neighbor came over and we were having a picnic in the backyard on the watermelon blanket and she is like... "why is your blanket not done"  She was horrified, so she took my little blanket home and finished the binding for me.  THANK YOU Martha!

So lately I haven't been doing much sewing and I miss it.  I also have gained an appreciation for quilting and people who hand quilt.  So I decided to try and learn some quilting other than large squares and strip quilt tops.  I also wanted to try my hand and actually quilting the tops on my sewing machine instead of just tying them.

Plus my nephew, who received my first quilt ever, is having his first child in January.  So he gets to be the guinea pig again.

I decided to make a blanket like this.

It didn't look too hard for me. 
However, quilting on a sewing machine, in straight lines, WAS hard.
Here was my finished project before the binding.

So then I freaked out a bit.  I watched all of these videos on how to make your own blanket binding and then how to sew it to your blanket.  While it looked easy, connecting the fabric strips into a STRAIGHT binding was NOT easy.  I messed up in a few places and I think that is why it was harder to bind my quilt.  Anyway, yesterday I bound my first quilt with binding I made myself.  Here is the finished project.

I purchased fabric to make a boy blanket... since the chances of Jake having a girl are pretty slim in our family.  So that will be my next project... and then I bought ladybug fabric... BECAUSE I can't help myself!