First Project: B-Day Gift - Quilt

Well, this was an exciting project for me to start with. I wanted to get into sewing, and sew all kinds of different things and not just quilting. I knew my mother's birthday was coming up and I knew I was heading up to visit her to celebrating everyone's birthday all in one weekend so I decided to make her a quilt for her birthday. Keep in mind this was my first sewing project and didn't know where to start or what I needed and what to get and how much I needed of anything.

Two fabrics selected purple and green.

Thank goodness I came across such a wonderful forum board on the internet which is located here; Everything Sewing Forum. I am glad I came across this forum because not only did I get wonderful advice in doing this project, but a lovely lady on the board gave me extra attention to help guide me on my journey in this project.

checkerboard patchwork

I had gotten the two types of fabric I wanted to do the project with, purple flowery type of pattern and a green subtle type of pattern fabric to go with it. I didn't want the two fabrics chosen to clash so I put the green with purple and it worked out great! My mother's favorite color was purple, so I knew I had to do something with purple. Once I decided on the fabric, it was time to decide the design of how I was going to do the fabric. That's when I figured a checkerboard design would be best for my first quilt. I know that when I chosen that it was a bit overwhelming but once I started and had help to get going I was on a roll.

At first when I was cutting, and when I started I didn't have everything an actual "quilter" would have which was a rotary cutter. So when I started cutting I had scissors! I didn't think I'd ever be done cutting with scissors, and all I had for a ruler was a regular 1" wide ruler that was 12" long and a box. Interesting! The other part that was interesting was just learning how to get the very corners of the squares to match up to a perfect point. At first I had to rip out some stitching that I did and do it over. Frustrating at times, but I was bound and determined to get it right! After I figured out how to do it, I didn't have too many problems after that.

Once I got the checkerboard all stitched together and ready to roll, I had to work on the backing. That wasn't too hard since I just did 3 strips of the coordinating colors. I decided to do green, purple and then green again. I didn't want the purple to be overbearing for the quilt since I was doing the binding in the purple color.

Since I finally got a rotary cutter and rotary cutting board, I was able to go a little quicker on cutting. Especially for the binding! The binding procedure went quickly. After doing the binding cutting measuring and sewing together, I had to lay out the quilt sandwich. I had fun doing that since it was pretty easy, but for my first time I had to follow a few videos on the internet which thank god for videos on the net because that helped out tremendously! Then I tied the quilt and sewn on the binding, and was done! Here's the outcome of the blanket!

Front of quilt checkerboard patchwork

Front and back of quilt

Tying and quilt tag.

Definitely enjoyed making this quilt for my mother, and she loved it. I put the nice little touch of adding a "tag" with my name and year date because she likes to do that on a lot of things. My next project will be another blanket for a toddler, that should be interesting!