Baby Talk

Yesterday's machine quilting practice gave me the confidence to try it on a real quilt. Daddio's latest baby quilt was my first victim guinea pig.

I used the walking foot on the inside triangles. Keeping my lines straight was more difficult than I thought. I can see why free form stippling is so popular.

Speaking of stippling, I attempted to do some on the outside borders. It worked fairly well. You can see on the right that I skipped in a few places. That  is what happens when you pick up the foot and forget to leave the needle down. You get a big loop of thread. I snipped it off and will have to repair the area by hand.

 I am happy to say that the binding went on fairly smoothly but I did have a few quilted areas that had puckered badly and had to be ripped out. That was not a lot of fun with the flannel because it shreds so easily. I figured out that by working from the inside of the quilt I could cut the stitches and not leave marks on the outside. I also forgot to put the foot down once and ended up with a large area of bird's nests that had to be picked out. I am glad the windows are closed due to the AC being on or the neighbors would have gotten an earful when I discovered that giant mess on the back.

Material from the Connecting Threads Wild Ones collection

Having said all that, it still turned out pretty cute for my first try. After all, in a few months this will be full of all the nasty things that leak out of a baby so who is going to notice a few puckers and skips?