Twice the fun

Having shown you a couple of recent projects, I'm now going to jump back in time a bit and show you my first quilts. I'm afraid the photos in this post won't quite match the pace of the text because I didn't know I'd be blogging about this back then!

Back in January 2011 I became an aunty: my hubby's sister had gorgeous twin boys. What a wonderful opportunity to try making baby quilts :) My first mission was to find some fun boyish fabrics. Being new to quilting (and therefore not having much knowledge of fabric websites) it took me a while to find anything, but I eventually found a bundle of the Riley Blake 'Wheels' collection which I liked. I then began following a tutorial on how to make a simple baby quilt.

Unfortunately the bundle which arrived had pieces of fabric slightly smaller than advertised, so I began by scaling the plans down a bit. The quilts finished are 70cm x 70cm which is fairly reasonable considering, I think :) After figuring out sizes we (hubby Laurence and I) began cutting out squares. At this point I didn't have a rotary cutter and so it was quite a task! Laurence did a lot of the work - thanks love!

Figuring out the arrangement of the blocks was quite fun: we covered most of the area in front of our sofa with fabric squares. Decided in the end to split up the funky patterned squares with some plain ones to make the design less intense.

And so (or sew, heehee) the sewing began! Many, many squares to become many, many rows. I remember mostly enjoying the process, although I will say I'm glad she didn't have triplets! :P

 A little bit of embroidery. I consider embroidery to be a necessary evil.

Necessary as in I love the effect, evil as in I do not enjoy the process...

Next up, picking out fabrics for the border and the back. I decided to do one quilt in blue and the other in green so it would be easy to tell whose was whose. I picked out fabrics from a beautiful local fabric shop and was very lucky with the backing of one of the quilts: only 75cm was left in stock, just about enough! Perhaps being shortchanged on the Wheels fabric earlier was a blessing in disguise :)

And then quilting. Which I absolutely loved! I loved the comfortable, thick feel of the two layers of fabric plus wadding, and it was great to spend some quality time with the completed patchwork, feeding it through the machine.

Finally, binding the quilts. I picked out a great bright orange and as with the table-runner, hand-sewed it to the back of the quilt. Quite an enjoyable process, which went pretty quickly.

And so there you have it, two completed quilts. I had a lot of fun making these. They're not perfect (many mis-matched square corners, one hole appeared when I washed one which needed a quick fix) but they were my first quilts and I'm very proud of them. I hope they'll be much loved :)

 my eyes aren't really that dark, I just tried out the de-red-eye tool...

And here's the best photo in this post - the twins enjoying their quilts!

They're so cute, I love my nephews :)