Babies, Babies, and More Babies

Ok, dear friends....you are not going to believe this !!! Four of Matt and Junior's friends are having babies, and pretty much all within two months of each other as well. I guess you could call me crazy, but I wanted to make them baby blankets in order for me to practice my "stippling" technique. Three of these kids are having boy babies and one is having a girl. The first quilt is for the baby girl and was my very first attempt at actually "stippling" it myself. I tried to do this on my Singer sewing machine but was having a bit of trouble because I could not get the darning foot to work with the feed dog cover plate, but I tried anyway.


I took the quilt to the teacher extraordinaire, Ms Janet, for critiquing and was quite embarrassed to show it to her. She said I did "okay" and I'm sure she didn't want me to be discouraged. Anyway, she told me how I could do some things better. One thing she suggested was that I could use the darning foot WITH the feed dogs and low and behold, IT WORKED!!!


Here is the close-up of this quilt. It was a panel piece and I just added borders and quilted it. I actually bought two of the same panel because I was under the impression that two babies were supposed to be girls. These kids are all related and the babies are all going to be "cousins" so I thought how cute to have similar quilts. Anyway, once I had the pink quilts made I found out that one of the girls was actually now a boy so I had to come up with something quick.

Junior's best friend, Anthony, loves the Dallas Cowboys football team and he said, "hey, Mom, do you think you could make a Cowboys quilt for his baby." Well, how could I say no. I found this material from an online fabric store and bought a couple of yards of it.


This pattern was quick and easy and since Anthony's cousin's baby turned out to be a boy instead of a girl (as mentioned above), I thought great I can make the boy cousins the same baby blanket but with different backings. Anthony's has a white backing and the other one has this blue backing that was used for the inner border and binding too!!! These were my second and third attempts at "stippling", which I think I did pretty good considering. I finally got my darning foot to work (per Janet's expert advice) and tried stippling again.

I was determined to get this down. I thought if Yvette, a friend from class, can do it, I can do it !!! So, I tried and tried. I did Anthony's quilt and then his cousin's. Here is a close up of MY third stippling attempt, which is not too bad.

I had one more quilt to make and that one was for the oldest of the babies, which was born a few months ago. I couldn't possible give three of the cousins a blanket and not his baby one.

So I found this cute Winnie the Pooh material and again just added borders & backing! This was my fourth attempt at stippling and I was very happy with this one !!! It really turned out cute. The stippling design is not the best, but it will get better with practice.




According to some of the quilting web sites that Joy and I look at it takes 200-400 hours to learn how to work a long arm machine and I'm sure it takes at least a few hundred hours on how to stipple to get to be as good as the magical Janet. But, I endeavor to persevere !!! I brought these to class last Sunday and Janet again critiqued them. She was so supportive and proud that I'm just jumping in and doing it.

Yvette did great on hers and Joy is even meandering on Patricia's quilt (a lady we work with that has cancer). We are all going to get this down !!! We are all having so much fun with it too after pulling our hair out!!! Oh yeah, the other pink quilt I made (like the first one above), my mom bought it to give as a baby shower gift on Saturday!!! Does this make me a "professional" quilter ????.....just kidding !!!

Anyway, Joy, Yvette and myself are heading out for the 2007 Quilter's Run and will be hitting quilt shops all day looking for deals (details to follow since Joy & Yvette will be snapping pictures all along the way) !!! Check out Joy's blog too for some great info.

http://joy-denise.blogspot.com/

Love to all, Karene