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Friday, July 8, 2011

The First Quilt

So I bought a (very) inexpensive sewing machine on Amazon (which turned out to be great…I would highly recommend it to any new sewer), scoured the Internet for a beginner-friendly kit, made a trip to Jo-Ann’s for all of the quilty supplies I would need (rotary cutter, specialty rulers, the right thread), attached my quarter-inch foot, and I was ready to go! I did the majority of my research online. I had to learn how to properly cut, piece, quilt, and bind my project. I also had to learn the quilter’s lingo (batting, backing, binding, half-square triangle, miter, WOF, jelly roll, charm square, etc.) By the time the kit arrived I couldn’t wait to get started. Even though I was signed up for a beginning quilter’s class later that month I just had to try this one on my own. A week of cutting, sewing, and burning myself with the iron later, this quilt (fabric: Verna by Kate Spain) was born.


Pretty good for a first effort if I do say so myself. I stitched in the ditch and did ok with that, but quickly learned that I much prefer piecing to quilting. (For all of you non-quilty people out there, that means I liked sewing the pieces of fabric together to make a quilt top much more than I liked stitching through the quilt top, batting, and backing to secure all of the layers. Part of this may be because my sewing machine has a very small throat (neck??) so it was hard to bunch all of the fabric in there when It was time to sew the middle of the quilt.







The binding was a different story. I didn’t really understand mitering, or what a mitered corner should look like. I didn’t get how to hand stitch the back of the binding down so the thread wouldn’t show, so I made up my own way.








See how you can see those mini stitches? (You do have to look kind of hard...it's much more obvious in real life.) It took about three more quilts before I felt comfortable attaching the binding, and I still have trouble once I get around the whole quilt and have to attach the beginning of the binding strip to the end. Binding trouble or not, I was very proud to have finished The First Quilt!!

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