Louisa Enright's Blog

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!