Work Hard, Craft Harder: Week 11: A Quilt for Ceci

As I mentioned in my post where I made a quilt for my friend Ann's baby Josie, I made a couple of crib sized quilts for my twin nieces Lucy and Bett for Christmas. I intended at the time to make a quilt for their older sister, my niece Ceci, but unfortunately with all of the Christmas gifts I sewed this year I didn't get one made by Christmas. Ceci's 3rd birthday is in May, so I thought a quilt would make for a nice birthday gift. Even though she sleeps in a double bed, I figured I would still make a crib sized quilt that she could keep in her playroom or to cuddle up with while watching a movie or something.

I knew her bedroom had teal, lime green, and pink in it, so I wanted make something with those colors in it. I fell in love with this brightly-colored peacock fabric and knew I wanted to use it for the back of the quilt, so I tried to find other complimentary fabrics for the quilt squares. I started with 9 cuts of 1/8 yard fabric to cut into squares, 1 cut of 3/8 yard for the border, 1 cut of 1/4 yard for the binding or edging, and 1 1/4 yards fabric for the backing.

I first ironed all fabric to get the wrinkles out and used my rotary cutter, quilting ruler and cutting mat to cut the following:

1/8 yard fabric into 9 total 4 1/2 inch by 4 1/2 inch squares. An tip to save on time is to fold the fabric and cut multiple squares at once :)
3/8 yard of fabric into 3 1/2 inch wide strips (measuring 42 inches long or whatever the length of the fabric is)
1/4 yard of fabric into 2 1/2 inch wide strips (measuring the length of the fabric).

Before I start sewing the squares together, I like to lay everything out to determine how things will look. I try (and don't always succeed) to not place any two of the same colors next to each other and try to have each of the 9 fabrics appear in any row/column only 1 time, although that tends to get pretty tricky to make work when I get to laying out the last few rows of squares. This is all of the cut fabric laid out:

Next I make 9 piles of fabric, one for each row, and keep them in the same order that I want to sew them together. I usually label each pile with a post-it-note and the number 1-9 to keep them straight. Next I start sewing! By now I've made the quilts so many times that I don't need to look at the tutorial I religiously followed for the first couple of quilts I made found here: http://www.diaryofaquilter.com/p/beginning-quilting-series.html

Once the front was pieced together and the front, batting, and backing was pinned together using curved safety pins, I started sewing the 3 pieces together diagonally through each square and from the edge of the borders. I don't mark where I sew these lines, but just feed the material so I sew through the corners of each of the squares. It does get a bit tricky to make sure the backing material doesn't get bunched up, and it can be a little difficult to sew the lines in the center of the quilt due to so much fabric needing to be curled up against the machine but it is easy to do if you can sew a straight line!

When I finished sewing parallel lines through the squares, I iron the quilt again and use the cutting mat, quilting ruler, and rotary cutter to cut off the remainder of the of batting and backing.

Next, I sew the 4 strips that I cut for the binding or edging together in 1 long straight line and the fold in half so both sides are the "right side" of the fabric. I then pin the binding to the back of the quilt (described in detail here) and start sewing. Once the binding is sewed to the back of the quilt, I flip it up, iron over to the front, and pin it to the front of the quilt.

Now for the easy part! I sewed the binding to the front using a 1/4 inch seam allowance (mainly just following the edge of the binding) and I am finished! Well almost, I usually give it one more good ironing, cut any stray threads, and lint roll the whole thing.