Plaster & Disaster

First off, thank you for your support and congratulations for my baby news! We’re excited, and now also I have a project I’ve been saving that I can finally share with you. Also just an FYI that we’re going to take a post or two off before our next, so hopefully this will tide you over.

My mom has many impressive skills and qualities, among them that she is an incredible quilter. She loves to quilt, and has made some truly beautiful pieces including the quilt in our bedroom which was a wedding gift:

She also made me a quilt for my college graduation in my school colors. I don’t have a photo from our current house because I keep it tucked away most of the time so the cats don’t get their fur all over it (my mom is allergic to our cats, so it’s adding insult to injury), but here it is right after she gave it to me when I was living in my first apartment in Boston:

Yes, that is how I decorated my first grown-up room. Please don’t judge me, I was 22. FOCUS ON THE BEAUTIFUL QUILT.

Anyway, I suspected that my mom might make a baby quilt (an educated suspicion because the moment I told her we were expecting she started buying baby quilt patterns and fabrics, enough for me to have like 100 babies…sorry Mom but apparently Sam and I were not built to make babies quite that easily). Since I like my mom and I like crafty things, I thought it would be fun for us to make a quilt together and so I pitched her the idea. She was enthusiastic, but it meant we had to get it done in a single weekend since the summer is too busy for us to reliably get together multiple times (she live four hours away and works as an Assistant Camp Director during the summer, which means she is working 24/7).

We found a weekend in early June (this post is delayed because it’s hard to post about making a baby quilt before telling you I’m also making a baby…), and I started sending her inspiration images so we could pick a pattern. I sent her a variety of patterns I liked, most of them geometrics/modern designs with bold colors. Of the ones I sent her, she recommended we go with something like this:

Her thinking was that it’s made of half-square triangles, which are relatively easy to piece together, and can be done in lots of different colors and patterns — thus making it reasonable to try to make in a single weekend, as opposed to a quilt that requires more complex cutting and piecing.

As most quilters do, she has about 5 million fabric selections so she sent me some options, and Sam and I ultimately decided we liked bold solids in the colors of the raindbow:

She arrived on a Friday evening, and we got right to work cutting our pieces!

I should preface the rest of this post by saying that this is not a tutorial. A) I am not a skilled enough quilter to write a detailed tutorial, and B) As you’ll see, my mom ultimately finished the last steps of the quilt without me in the middle of the night while I was asleep. Read on to learn how that happened….

Anyway, back to the not-tutorial. We used a method of making half square triangle blocks that are half white, half color that allowed us to easily make 48 blocks (8 of each color). We started by cutting ~10″ wide strips of each color, which we then cut down into two ~10″ x 10″ blocks each. Then we similarly cut blocks of white the same size.

By that point it was about 10pm on Friday night (we’d started after dinner), so we called it an evening and got going again Saturday morning. First we matched up a block of color with a block of white, right-sides in. Then we used a marking pen (which disappears when ironed, so cool!) to draw the diagonals across each square, and then 3/8″ to either side of the diagonal center lines.

Next we sewed down all the 3/8″ lines:

And then cut down the diagonals and perpendiculars to create 8 individual blocks:

When opened outward, each block was half white, half color. Magic! We ironed them open, and then we used a square tool to trim each block to exactly the same size (since they were all close, but weren’t identical with squared off corners — and precision is essential when piecing a quilt!).

At this point my mom also cut 32 all-white squares — added to the 48 half-color squares, that made for 80 squares total, which we’d use to make the quilt 8 across and 10 long.

Then we set up her design wall, which is a giant collapsible panel made from light-weight felt-like material that fabric sticks to. The point is to allow you to play around with your quilt design somewhere other than your floor.

I had no idea what I was doing, but just started putting blocks onto the wall in a formation that I liked.

I really had no method besides trying to spread the colors fairly evenly and not have too many sections that were overly white or conversely too full of colors. When I was done, it looked like this:

My mom suggested we take a photo to look at, since sometimes that helps her see new things in a quilt and decide if she likes the design. It’s funny because I do the same thing with interior design — sometimes it’s too much to process live, and it’s easier to see possible changes to make if you’re looking at a photo of a room.

Based on the above photo, I decided to make just one change: rotating the green triangle toward the bottom of the left edge — I just didn’t like it being the exact same orientation as the blue one above it. Here’s what we were left with:

And of course, we needed a photo of the quilt-makers!

Next up it was time to sew together all the pieces. This is easiest done by first making strips, and then sewing all those strips together. So we started by sewing each block to the one next to it, working horizontally across each row. We were sure to work off of a photo we’d taken of everything in the right order, since otherwise it was super easy to forget the orientation of each piece (since it was so random to begin with, but we liked what we had so didn’t want to change it accidentally).

After we finished each strip, we ironed it flat and pressed the seams in the same direction (but alternated the direction for each strip so that the seams went left on one strip, right on the one below it, left on the one below that, etc). That way the fabric didn’t bunch up as much when it was time to sew the strips together.

Then with all the strips sewn, we sewed those together.

And then pressed the whole thing flat, with all the horizontal seams going in the same direction. Here you can see how the vertical seams alternate (because we alternated when making the strips), and the horizontal seams are all going up.

And here’s the top of the quilt, all sewn together!

Next it was time to make the back of the quilt. We decided to just use leftover fabric in three of the colors, which my mom sewed together while I took a nap (we were going out to dinner with a dozen extended family members, and I needed some downtime…apparently it’s not easy work growing a person from scratch inside you). We got home from dinner late, so got started again Sunday morning.

The first step in the morning was to tape down the back of the quilt, right side down.

Then we lay the batting on top of it, cutting it to size so it was just inside the edge of the backing. We used a relatively thin batting since this doesn’t need to be a heavy duty quilt for warmth.

Next we lay the top on that, with the right side facing up. We smoothed it perfectly flat.

To keep the whole thing together while we quilted, we pinned the front, batting, and back together using quilting pins, alternating blocks but doing every block around the edges.

Then it was time to quilt! The inspiration quilt had vertical white quilting through the middle of each block, but we wanted to do something different. My mom suggested we try echo quilting, which is where you quilt around the design in concentric lines. So in our case, we’d be quilting in the white around the outline of the colored blocks, starting 1/4″ from the edge of each one and then repeating again every half inch from there. It was a really time consuming process, but we could quickly tell it was going to look great.

My mom has special quilting gloves that we used, which makes it easier to push the fabric around.

To machine quilt, you just roll the fabric up so you can get to the middle sections and start sewing! It’s much easier to do a baby quilt because it’s so much smaller (so less to roll up and move around as you quilt), I’m so impressed she does adult-sized quilts this way!

I promise I also quilted a lot of it.

Here I am rotating the whole quilt to change the direction of the sewing.

And here you can see the echoing really starting to take shape.

We could tell it was going to look amazing, BUT it was definitely a slow-going method. By 11pm on Sunday night we were still at it. My mom was determined to finish (binding and all), but I just had to go to bed…we’d been going since 9am and I had work in the morning. My mom insisted on finishing it without me, which she did at 4 in the morning. She is a quilting fiend.

But we were right, it looked awesome when finished! Here’s the front:

I love how the quilting makes the colorful blocks pop out.

And here’s the back:

It’s so cool to see the shapes that the quilting made. The little yellow square at the top is for the label, which I need to make using a fabric pen and then sew down by hand.

And that’s it, the story of how we (and especially my mom) made a beautiful baby quilt in a single weekend! Is it too precious to put on the floor and let a baby crawl all over? Quite possibly…but we’ll see, I bet my baby will be pretty dang precious too.