Etsy shop and a new baby quilt!

I've opened an Etsy shop to start selling some quilts. I have a few baby blankie (Blankie and a Backup) sets up there right now, but there will be quilts coming soon!

My shop is called Bent Needle Quilts and I'm planning on using that name for craft fairs, also.

Check it out!

And here's the quilt that I plan on listing soon. It's a crib-sized baby quilt with a teal ombre back. I just need to take some better photos of it first!

I love this color combination! It's really gender neutral (but not in a boring yellow or green way), but also really fun!

I used a simple double-stitch every few strips for the quilting.

How fun is this ombre fabric! I wish I could find it in more colors, it makes a great backing fabric. I have several more quilt tops done that I plan on finishing soon, so more to come!

Modern Baby Quilt and A Few Lessons Learned

I've decided this September to do a DIY/Craft fair to sell my quilts. I've been buying lots of fabric and finishing off quilt tops to work towards my goal of having 20 baby quilts (crib-sized) and 5-8 afghan sized quilts to sell at the Ferndale DIY Street Fair.

In the meantime, I also finished a commissioned quilt for a friend to give to her daughter-in-law who is expecting. This might be my favorite quilt yet, and I figured a few things out while working on this quilt!

First the quilt:

I machine-quilted on either side of the stitches to strengthen it, but I also think it makes it look more finished.

One of the things I've struggled with is machine binding. I've followed this tutorial before and just felt like I was fighting and wrangling my quilt the whole time --- it would be pulling and I had a really hard time keeping the stitch straight.

This time I made my binding 3" instead of 2.5" which helped a little. I don't like sewing binding with a 1/4" allowance because I find I'm fighting the feed dogs the whole time - they want to push it over when I try to ride that line. But even with the 3" I was fighting it.

Then I tried something that I hate doing as a sewer... I pinned it. What a difference!!!  I know some quilters that pin every single seam and that's just not my style; I want to get straight to the sewing.  But this is one of those cases where pinning really is essential. I pinned horizontally and ran over the needles while I sewed and it moved through the seam flawlessly. I think it also helped that I pinned in small amounts as I sewed - I stopped every foot or so and pinned the next foot.

This quilt is hands down the "cleanest" quilt I've made yet - the lines are really straight and even. I'm so happy with it!

Here's a couple other baby/crib sized quilt tops I've finished in the last few weeks also:

Naptime quilt made from abandoned Turning Twenty quilt

Recently, my daughter was moved over to the toddler class at daycare and I was informed she needs a blanket for naptime. Since we, like most new parents, were told to never ever put a blanket anywhere near a crib for the first year, we have a strange shortage of baby blankets in the house. Instead of purchasing one, I decided to turn an abandoned quilt into her nap blanket.

Last year I started a Turning Twenty quilt, but mid-way through decided I didn't like anything about it. The colors were too almost-pastel, I had two colors in the mix that were similar and causing problems with the pattern (they kept winding up next to each other), and I just didn't like the quilt. For a nap quilt, though, this might be perfect. It's going to get washed a lot and might get ruined anyways, so it seemed like a perfect use for a scrapped project!

I managed to put this together during one of her naps (which is fitting), so that means it's messy, none of the seams are particularly straight, and the pattern isn't really well balanced. But, hey, it only took a little over an hour! Disclaimer: I already had the turning twenty squares done, so it was just a matter of sewing them together, assembling the quilt sandwich, quilting it with a few (kind of) straight runs of the sewing machine, and sewing on the binding (again, not particularly straight).

Amazingly, I had exactly the right amount of everything I needed. I had just enough batting left from another project and the exact right length of satin blanket binding.  I normally wouldn't use satin binding for a quilt, but I kind of like it for this purpose.

So, without further ado, here is the fastest quilt I've made to date: