My First and Second Quilts

Well, I haven’t done much papercrafting lately, but I’ve been getting very well-acquainted with my sewing machine!  How did this happen?  Well, my niece Julia is going to be turning 2 soon.  I ordered her some pajamas (and the next day I found out that although she’ll probably be okay wearing the princess pajamas, I shoud have gotten her something Elmo).  Apparently princesses are more of an Emma thing.  Well, the PJs were a good deal, and I’d been planning on buying her a toy or something to go with it anyway, so she’ll still be getting the pajamas.  So I come up with the idea of making her a quilt with Elmo in it, since she is so into Elmo right now.  Keep in mind, I’m a novice sewer, I’m a novice quilter… I can count on one hand the number articles of clothing I’ve sewn, and up until this week, I’d never made a quilt on my own.

So I got online… and found instructions for how to make a rag quilt.  What I actually wound up doing was combining a couple of different instruction sets from here and here.  For my quilt, I wound up using 7/8 yard of seven different flannels, cut in 7″ squares and then giving it a 1/2″ seam.

Elmo Quilt Front

Elmo Quilt Back

So there is my version of the rag quilt.  All in all, I’m happy with how it turned out, especially for a first attempt.  Are there things I would change?  Of course!  I’m terrible about keeping stuff in the right order when I lay it out.  I’m not sure what to do about that issue…. probably just more practice.  So a few of the rows had to be moved around so that none of the squares was next to the same pattern.  I also discovered I’m not a huge fan of all the cutting required for rag quilts — but I do like the final result! LOL… so yes, I am planning on making another rag quilt… possibly for my niece Emma, whose birthday is in May.

Now what to do with the scraps?  Hmm… I’ve made a couple memory quilts with Debb (although she did all the sewing for those; I helped cut the squares and with the layout), and she does tied quilts.  I had some strips of flannel left, and from those I could cut ten 4″ squares.  I had enough leftover flannel to use as a batting for the middle of the quilt, and I backed it using part of a Twin XL sheet leftover from my college days.  I used some yellow worsted weight yarn leftover from a knitting project to tie the quilt.  This quilt was a total experiment on my part.  I’d never pieced a quilt top together, but it turned out.  Right now, my fingers are still recovering from pushing that needle through all the layers of the quilt in order to tie it!

Elmo Doll Quilt

Hopefully Julia likes these quilts and gets lots of use out of them.