A First Try at Quilting

After making four different baby blankets all the same way... one side a single piece of fabric, the other side a collection of squares sewn together in a way that looks like a quilt, but cannot actually be called a quilt, I decided it was time to experiment with actually quilting a blanket.

I have never taken a class on quilting. I was supposed to do that this summer, actually. With the new baby, that seems unlikely, but I'm sure I'll get around to it eventually. So really, all I know about quilting is this: a blanket becomes a quilt when three pieces of fabric are sewn together with the top stitching. Or something like that. I may be wrong about that definition, actually, but it is with that definition that I proceeded.

I have no idea how real quilters put the middle piece of fabric in their quilts. I wanted to do the whole sew the back and front to each other right sides together and then turn inside out like I did with all of my other blankets ('cause it keeps me from having to figure out how to finish the edges), but I couldn't make a third piece of fabric work with that. So I wound up sewing the middle piece to the top of the quilt, wrong sides together to keep the fabric in place, and then sewing the back on to the double pieced front wrong sides together and then turning the whole thing inside out.

I chose to do the top stitching in concentric squares because someone told me that was pretty easy... you just use the foot to keep the lines the right amount apart.

I'm doing each set of four pieces of fabric with their own squares. The quilt itself is 6x8 little squares, so there will be a total of 3x4, or 12 sets of quilted bigger squares, if that makes sense. I completed the piecing together of the blanket and 2 of the 12 top stitching parts tonight. Hopefully in the next few days, I'll finish the other 10 and then I'll have my finished quilt.

Here's a view from the back, which really just illustrates how much nicer the quilt would look if I would bother to put some sort of binding on the edge, but I think tackling one new technique at a time works best.