I finally have a quilty finish to share with you! A big one (relatively) – I seem to have spent all year making (or at least finishing) minis, bags, pillows, etc, with no big finishes.
I don’t know what initially gave me the idea of making this. I had seen all the individual letters made during the original Spell it with Fabric blog hop last year, but for some reason about six months ago I started whipping up the individual letters in between making other things. Each letter is very quick to make and doesn’t use too much fabric. As a plus, there are minimal HSTs (there may not be any actually) which makes me a happy quilter.
Anyway, I decided that this would be the perfect teacher gift for Moo’s Kindergarten teacher. How fitting to give an alphabet quilt to the person teaching my girl to read? I think in general teachers are underpaid and underappreciated and Kindergarten has to be a tough gig, right? I love my kids more than anything in the world and some days I need to go outside and take a deep breath – imagine doing that with 30+ that aren’t even your own....
I needed to add four blocks to square out the quilt and I decided to use these cute little books from Ayumi Mills’ Patchwork Please! I love the blocks, but they were a little smaller than I needed and the day I made them I reallystruggled to figure out how to size them up. I just could not get my brain around it. I did manage to get blocks the right size eventually, after much swearing, but they are not centred, which is not that noticeable when they are not sewn into the quilt, but it became very apparent once the top was all pieced together because now the quilt is not symmetrical. And that bugs me. A lot. (You should see the fun we have at our house when we hang pictures).
I backed the quilt in some of the famous Ikea Britten print (Tempe Ikea has loads of it people). I bought 6 metres of it. As a bonus, it was just wide enough that I didn’t have to piece the back. Yay! Gotta love avoiding a pieced back for a quick finish.
I quilted it up stitching down the sashing and around the letters in white Aurifil. If I have one regret about this quilt, it is that I tried to stitch in the ditch around the letters. It just looks....not bad, but I know it could have been better. I should have unpicked it and started again after the first one, but for some insane reason I persevered and I don’t think it is my best work. I would have been better off echoing the letters. But never mind. I’ll know better next time. Not having quilted anything bigger than a baby quilt for a while, I found quilting this really hard. Turning the corners on the letters made some weird things happen if I wasn’t careful – something happened to the tension and the thread got caught in the machine and pulled at the bottom and broke. The quilting was also made much more difficult by the batting. I used Quilters Dream that I bought off Massdrop and I won’t be buying that again. It was so fluffy and my threads that need to be buried have huge fuzz balls attached.
I bound it with a rainbow jelly roll that I picked up ages ago, so now it is done!
That is a finish off my Q4 FAL goals and my November ALYoF finish (and I might add, a huge weight off my mind).
So here are the stats:
Quilt Name: Now I Know my ABCs
Size: 55.5” x 62.5”
Pattern: Spell it With Fabric from Moda
Fabric: Scrappy (nearly) all from my stash
Binding: Scrappy Rainbow Solids
Backing: Ikea Britten Fabric
Quilted: With white Aurifil by me
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