I finished the last of the I Spy quilts. Here it is quilted, bound and even washed! Now that the two quilts I had pin-basted are done it was time to pin-baste some more quilts, and that's what I did today.
Here are five baby quilts pin-basted and ready to quilt. I did all of these today, which is really a lot when you figure in all that I did. I only had the backing pieced for the top quilt, and I had to piece all the other backings today. Most of them just needed a vertical strip added in to make them a bit wider. I didn't want to cut anything off of yardage, just because it would have taken longer, so I searched through old borders and such to find some strips that worked well enough.
My rolls of batting are going down really quickly, but I'd like to be able to hold off until after the first of the year to buy more rolls of batting. I am trying to be creative on these small quilts, and save the rest of the batting on rolls for the bigger quilt tops I need to quilt. Two of these quilts are for the twins, and for those I went ahead and cut batting off the crib sized roll of batting I have. I found one piece of batting that was cut off of a large individual batting, and it was just the right size for one of these quilts.
For the other two baby quilts, I searched through my pieced batting. A while back, I took all my batting scraps and pieced them together, polyester batting with other polyester batting, and cotton battings together. I found out a lot about piecing batting from that experience. I found out I do not like piecing polyester batting together, but piecing together Warm and Natural cotton batting is a breeze. I used most of the pieced batting right after I pieced them, but I have some smaller ones still hanging around. Since I don't like piecing polyester batting, I only keep bigger pieces of it now. If it's not 8 or 10 inches wide and a decent length, I throw it away. I know some people save all the small pieces, but that doesn't work for me. I don't want to spend an hour piecing together small scraps of poly batting to save a couple of bucks. Life is too short to spend my quilting time doing something I dislike to do. I found a pieced poly batting that was a bit too small, but I had some bigger batting scraps left from the I Spy quilts, and by adding one strip to the side, and one to the bottom, it was big enough! That gave me four battings to use.
I found a pieced cotton batting that was close to the right size. I searched through the sewing room a bit and found enough cotton batting scraps to make it bigger too. I feel really good about what I got done done today. I pieced four backings, using up some leftover orphan blocks and border strips in the process. I used two of my pieced battings, after making them a bit bigger. I made some room in my sewing room closet by using the miscellaneous battings, which is really nice. I pin-basted them all today, and now five quilts are ready for quilting!
This batch of quilts has the rest of the "must-do" quilts. The twins quilts are long overdo, but at least they'll be done before it turns cold again. Another of these is for one the kid's friends who is having a baby. Of the other two quilts here, one will be donated to Project Linus, and I think I'll hold on to the other one for a baby gift. As I quilt on these, I'll think about which quilt tops get quilted next. I'm debating between doing all the baby quilt tops in a row, to get my number of finishes up, or doing a couple larger ones, so the quicker ones are saved for last. Whichever way I decide to do it, the goal is the same, to turn my pile of quilt tops into a pile of quilts!
No comments:
Post a Comment