Quilting – it’s not for everyone, but this project was a lot of fun in the end. After quilting, I discovered it is definitely not my favorite thing to do. It tends to get tedious and time consuming at times but I am in love with the final results. I can’t bring myself to do patchwork quilting as I have never cared for the look of them but sewing a quilt with applique with my Silhouette Cameo was something I knew I would enjoy. I wanted to make a quilt for my Nephew, which was the inspiration of his Mason Jar Coin Bank.
In Silhouette Studio, the program for my Cameo, I created a pattern for the applique. Typically, you work with a 12×12 mat in the program but I changed mine to the size of the quilt for sizing purposes.
After adding the images for the baseball stitches and his name to the mat, I needed to size it down for it to print on copy paper of 8.5×11. In Silhouette Studio, there is a tool that allows you to cut/slice images.
I sliced the baseball stitches in several pieces and shrunk my mat down to 8.5×11.
Fitting as many as I could on one sheet of paper, I cut them out as my pattern. Once cut, I taped them together.
After both patterns for the baseball stitches and his name were cut out, laid out on red cotton, and the fabric was cut, I ran Heat n Bond Lite through my Silhouette Cameo the same as I did for the pattern pieces. It was a little bit of a puzzle but matched them up to the red cotton and ironed them on.
I use Heat n Bond Lite to place the applique on the fabric so it doesn’t move around when I am sewing it in place. It is a two-sided glue on paper that must be sewn. Iron your applique fabric onto the glue side, peel off the paper backing and iron your applique onto your project. I use this for all of my applique projects.
I followed the same procedure for his name and began sewing. I ran a zigzag stitch around all of the applique on the quilt.
It was starting to look like the final product and that’s always exciting. It was time to quilt.
First, I had to “sandwich” the quilt, after I finished sewing my backing together. Since cotton isn’t sold in wide enough widths, you need to piece it together. Taking three strips of my material, I sewed them together to make a large enough backing. Laying it on the floor face down, I added my batting for thickness and warmth and then my white cotton with the baseball applique on top. Pin. Pin. Pin. Everywhere. The more pins you have the more it won’t move and shift while sewing. Since you need a lot of pins for quilts, make sure you pick up enough so you don’t have to do what I did and make several trips to the store to buy more.
Finally, I had the quilt “sandwiched” and safety pins galore. I set up my machine to quilt with a 1 inch spacing for nearly almost straight lines. My biggest peeve while sewing is running out of material. After my safety pin trips, I failed to purchase enough thread – twice. Lesson learned with quilting – quilts take a lot of thread! It’s always better to have too much than not enough. Because of my applique design, I had a plan for my quilting lines to follow around the appliqué, so I felt it would be easier to do one side for a few stitches and then switch to the other side, so the stitches were even numbered on each side. All of the reading I did on quilting, as this was my first quilt, I never found that one, very important, bit of information that stated you have to, and I mean HAVE TO, start on one side and go to the other. Never, never, never starting on one side then switch to the opposite and meet in the middle. My mistake.
So this is what happens when you do exactly that and don’t continue with the first side you chose to start on. Apparently the fabric bunches in the center. Makes complete sense now that I really think about it. Needless to say, I spent the next few hours seam ripping. Once all of the quilting was done, I sewed the edges together with bias tape and it was complete!
For a 7-year-old on Christmas, he seemed pretty happy, as did his mom. 🙂 At the end of the day, my first quilt turned out quite nice despite the imperfections of meeting in the middle and it was worth the time to make. I may try another one someday but I think a bigger machine and better set up will be in order.