(with the caveat that I did sew a few more pieces of doll clothes today, but I gave them to someone and did not take photos.)
Poking around in the archives here will show that I do like making patchwork, but have pretty much never made a quilt (with one single straight line exception.) I have had a stash of pieced quilt tops in my closet for years; some I took a good look at it and said "It was fun to make but I am never going to finish that" and donated some to the craft thrift store. I still had the stash of pieced quilt tops, it was just a smaller stash, somewhat more aligned with my personal tastes.
A big part of the reason I hadn't finished them was because...well...batting is expensive. So, when one of the local Walmart stores remodeled somewhat recently and put two rolls of batting on clearance, I snapped those up. And then they sat in the closet. For quite a while. Kind of in the way (I had to move them every time I wanted to use a backdrop for doll photos that wasn't the painted stage backdrop.)
So, instead of realizing that I could just put them in the top of the closet where the quilt tops were, I decided that Now Is The Time To Make Quilts.
Which required finally acquiring a quilting/darning foot, which I got cheap via eBay. I absolutely do not plan to make quilting something I do regularly, so cheap is fine.
And I do understand that I will probably never do enough free motion quilting to be anywhere near good at it, but I did want to practice on something smaller first. I got into the unsorted scraps from relatively recent projects and chose a pink chambray and a green plaid, and added a thrifted floral that I didn't have a lot of
Then I cut 96 little triangles that I sewed into 48 squares that I sewed into chevrons. I loosely stitched some batting off-cuts to roughly the same size, then made and pinned the quilt sandwich with more of the floral as the backing fabric.
I moved my sewing machine to the end of my sewing table, and put the ironing board next to the table (where I normally sit) to help support the thing--it's 16" x 21" so I probably could have worked with it with the sewing machine in the normal place, but that won't be an option for anything larger so I wanted to get a feel for the new position. I still haven't figured out the best place to put the lamp, but, overall, it worked.
Like I said, I did not expect to be good at this, nor do I expect to gain enough experience to become good at it. But! It was easier to get a feel for than I expected.
I had a few false starts, which were easy enough to pick out so I could start over a few times, until I got to a point where I felt like things were going well enough to keep going.
Then I confidently turned the rest of the floral print into half inch double fold bias tape
...which I had problems applying, so I looked things up and discovered that "double fold" is not generally whats used, and people generally start with a strip that's more than 2" wide. I have learned!
I also started trying to apply the bias tape with the bias tape foot, and I didn't think I could figure out how to miter the corners using that, so I curved the corners. Which the foot couldn't handle, either (at least not under my guidance.) I ended up unfolding one edge of the bias tape and sewing that to the back, then flipping the rest around to the front and edge stitching. This is something I am obviously very comfortable doing with shirt button bands--nice, flat shirt button bands. Things didn't go so well with the considerably more three-dimensional edges here. It was a learning experience, it's fine.
I am already considering cutting this up to make into something else (what would that be? no idea, but it's a possibility.)
And then I took the trimmed-off batting scraps from the above and laid them out to make another, smaller quilt sandwich, purely for practice
It's a mess and I'm still nowhere near "good" but I do feel a bit more confident. Maybe.
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