Day 23

I called several embroidery places and the one that sold me was Metro Embroidery. The woman I spoke with was impressed with the quilt (I had emailed her the Power Point image so she knew how I wanted the embroidery to look and to make sure it was spelled correctly). She also was familiar with quilts as she makes them for cancer patients. This reminded me of Kyla, and my experience in the NICU. Volunteers made all of the tiny baby blankets for her (and all of the premature babies), they dressed up like Santa and gave books and teddy bears to the babies, and the volunteers and nurses truly made the experience a special and memorable one. As soon as the woman said that, I knew there was no other place I wanted the embroidery done. :-)

I told them I would bring the quilt in by 3 PM, so they could have it finished by Wednesday. I had finished sewing the pieces, and had 3 hours to sew the border together before dropping it off, so naturally, I started with the crib side of the quilt. I lined up the cars and pinned the borders one at a time to the quilt.

Once pinned, I sewed the border to the quilt using the straight stitch as before. After it was sewn on, I ironed the back and then the front to press the seams down and iron out the bunched fabric.

The red strip is now 1/2" wide.

Once all of the sides were sewn and ironed, I set the corners on the rotary mat and cut off the excess. I then sewed over the edges that I cut to keep the thread in place since the overlapped part was cut off.

When all of the corners were cut, I cut the diagonals for sewing the edge together, leaving a 1/4" seam allowance.

I then sewed the diagonals together. This worked well on 3 of the 4 corners.

One of the borders was not centered when I ironed the cars onto it, so when I lined it up to sew the border to the quilt using the center car to judge the distance, I found out I was short by about 1". I thought that I would be able to sew the edges together without a problem despite this difference. However, when I sewed the diagonal, the red from one border strip and the blue from the other strip were off by about 1/4" and overlapped each other rather than lining up.

I had to (once again) take the seam ripper and cut open part of the diagonal and about 3" of the seam connecting the border and red strip. Then I cut a red strip from my scrap material and attached it to make the red strip longer. I trimmed the blue strip by the 1/4" it was off and crossed my fingers when I lined up the diagonal again. In doing this, I had misjudged the other side. So I had to do something similar to the other red strip as well. It was close to 3:00 and in my haste I realized that I sewed the 2nd scrap of red to the wrong side!! :-( Taking a deep breath and trying not to be frustrated, I cut the piece from the wrong side and sewed it to the correct side. Then I measured, cut, and re-sewed the diagonal together crossing my fingers that it would work. Bingo! Even though you can see the patched red strips, the diagonal lined up pretty good!

From a distance, you can't even notice! :-)

Without the embroidery, this is what the crib side of the quilt looked like with the border.

I finished in time to meet my 3 PM deadline, and dropped off the quilt at the embroidery shop. Then I went to work on the play side of the quilt. I followed the same steps as above, but this time, I made sure that all of the sides lined up, and the diagonal edges all looked good on the first attempt. Progress! :-) The cars lined up as well, and were centered nicely.

The colors don't look great due to the sunlight coming in the window, but this is what the play side looked like with all 4 sides of the border attached.

When this was done, I ironed it and hung over the staircase. There is nothing left to do until Wednesday, when I pick up the other side of the quilt.