Every Quilt Is a Learning Process

She said, with a sigh.  Friends of mine are expecting, and the baby shower was yesterday, so I got it in my head to make a simple baby quilt.

Some aspects of this went well -- I had a stack of Beatrix Potter fat quarters I never got around to using for my own kids, so the fabric was picked with no effort on my part.  I chose 4" finished squares sewn into nine patches, made 12 blocks, and sewed them together three by four.  No sashing, no borders, and the part that took the most time was cutting the squares.  Various tips I've picked up over the years even meant that almost all the little intersections matched.

That was the last part that went well.  I picked a yellow fabric with tiny white dots for the background, only the manufacturers had coated the fabric with something that made it so slick the feed dogs on the machine couldn't grip the fabric.  I finally had to wash out that finish, which was risky because I hadn't washed the fat quarters (generally one wants to either wash all the fabrics before cutting and sewing or none of them, to prevent uneven shrinking).  I taped the backing fabric quite well onto the floor before layering the batting and top, and smoothed the top over and over while pinning.  And yet I still got a couple of the dreaded folds in the backing when I quilted it.  Worse still, on the front one row of squares got bunched up, and I discovered the problem too late to fix it.  (Next time I'm ironing the top, even if it looks like it doesn't need it.)  As for the uneven quilt stitches . . .

It looks okay from a distance:

And it survived a wash.  Good thing the baby won't notice the errors.

I do better with small things.