Day 26

I stopped by The Quilt Shoppe to show the quilt to all the ladies and to buy some more thread. The ladies all LOVED the quilt, which completely made my day! :-) I spoke with Sally, a friend and experienced quilter, and she suggested using invisible/clear thread and sewing it in the ditch for the quilting part so it's not noticeable. This is a great idea, however I was concerned, because I read several places that I should use cotton or embroidery thread to keep it from cutting through the cotton fabric with extensive use and washes. With this suggestion in mind, options were discussed with the ladies at the quilt store as well, and they suggested either using ties (which I didn't think would look too good on this quilt) or making small stitches in the ditch, using the same color as the fabric - or clear thread. The difficulty is that there are 2 sides to the quilt, and the patterns are different on each, so making creative quilting lines around the colored strips on the play side, would mean that the black GT photo on the other side, would have strange lines running through it and could ruin the photo image.

I decided to get a few colors that matched the charcoal (faded black), light blues, and browns on the black GT photo, and then picked up red, green, and blue for the background and to match the strips. I will be making a number of 1" lines using straight stitches in the seams whenever I can, with matching thread, so that the layers and batting are securely held together all over the quilt, but it is not noticeable unless you look closely.

I took the pinned side, and rearranged the pins to where the 1" stitching would be.

Then, I swapped the white bobbin for blue thread, and put blue thread in the top as well.

The first one I did, I put right up on the edge.

You can see it up close if you look for it, but even a foot away, it's hard to see.

I found that the opposite side was not the same, and could be off by as much as 1/2"! Therefore, I had to be careful not to get any on the red of the other side. I did this once, requiring me to cut off that thread and sew it about 1/4" away from the seam. The color thread matched quite well with the background, so even though it was not on a seam, it was still very difficult to see.

Once the blue top and blue bottom parts were done, I kept the bobbin blue and put the white bobbin from earlier at the top to use as top thread. Then I sewed a 1" strip of white. The bottom should still be blue.

The top (white) part looked okay.

The white thread pulled through to the opposite side of the quilt, and that did NOT look good!! :-(

Good ol' seam ripper... I removed that and decided to use the lighter blue thread I had as top thread, and try to move the areas that needed to be sewn to the blue strips.

Here is a close up of one of the blue strips after changing threads and sewing.

Because the black GT took up a lot of space and was curvy, this didn't work in all places. There was one place in the middle of the quilt, where I switched to the light blue to match part of the black GT fabric, and because it was still blue, the 2 shades looked okay on both sides of the quilt.

When I finished sewing, I ironed both sides of the quilt and got rid of the fuzzes. One thing that I found, was that the fabric couldn't be laid flat due to the embroidery.

When I finished sewing, I took these pictures. The 1" sewn strips are about 8" apart throughout the quilt, but you can see that when you hold it back - even just 1-2 feet away - you cannot see the stitching at all.

Once that was done, I ironed both sides of the quilt, got rid of the fuzzes, and folded it up. It's now ready to take a trip to CA and be introduced to the little one. :-)

For those of you who stuck with me until the end, thanks for reading this blog! I’m sad to see the quilt go, but happy it is going to such a special little guy (with a great Daddy). Stay tuned for the next project. :-)