Day: May 16, 2012

Turkey Tracks: “Nora’s Friends: Peter and Benjamin Rabbit” Quilt

Turkey Tracks:  May 16, 2012

Nora’s Friends:  Peter and Benjamin Rabbit Quilt

My dear friend Rosie Pilkerton gave me this fabric panel about two years ago.  The kit was meant as a wall hanging–or an infant quilt–and came with backing and batting.  Rosie made it as a wall hanging and did a lot of wonderful free-motion quilting around the scene of the two rabbits.

Nora is Julia’s little sister–and I wanted a quilt she could love to death for her.  So, I added borders and made the quilt larger for a growing almost-toddler.

Here’s the finished quilt:

And another view:

You can see that I put in a wide outer border so that I could practice with the Constantine Quilts swag ruler–which is easy once you get the hang of it and which is so much fun and which makes a really nice border.  Constantine Quilts is an Australian company, but they now have an American distributor, Quilted Memories, LLC.  There are great videos on Utube to show you how to use these “no-nonsense” long-arm rulers.  I started with the 5-inch swag ruler and just ordered the 8-inch.  The number denotes the WIDTH of the swag.

Here’s a close-up of this adorable panel:

Here’s a view of the borders.  I like the red brick fabric I found–it spoke to me of English garden brick walls and bunnies who find ways around them.  I used it for the binding as well.

I was able to take this quilt back to the domestic machine and sew all the “stitch-in-the-ditch” borders down–that worked really well actually–with a walking foot, of course.

The backing is a soft cream polka-dot fabric, which blended beautifully with the front.  And you can see how pretty that swag border is from the back.  And, the nice lines made when I stitched down the borders from the front.

Thanks you again, Rosie.  Nora thanks you as well!

Turkey Tracks: “Julia’s Jungle” quilts

Turkey Tracks:  May 16, 2012

Julia’s Jungle Quilt

Steve, Ann, and their daughter Joann (one of my favorite people in this world) visited last week–driving up from Boston for the day.  Joann has two little girls, so I got myself organized, pulled down two quilting kits I had collected along my quilting way, and made them each a quilt.  These quilts are loosely quilted so as to be soft and cuddly and are meant to be dragged around, washed, and loved to death.

Here’s “Julia’s Jungle”–made from a kit assembled by Debbie at Quilt Diva’s in Rockland.  Debbie and Doris of Quilt Divas have a terrific selection of kid-friendly fabrics.

I especially like the orange-stripe binding on this quilt–which Debbie included in the kit packet.

Here’s a close-up of one of the panel’s animals:

Here’s  a picture of the borders–the black and white animal print works really well, don’t you think?

One of the fun things Debbie did when putting this kit together was to include some big, orange rickrack, which she used to separate what is really two panels.  Both the rick-rack and the orange-striped binding really drew me to this kit.

I like the backing I found for this quilt:

Joann reports that Julia loves her quilt.  I am so glad.  I had fun making it.