Finished: Inside Out Quilt

My first quilt of 2013 is DONE!  As little use as I have for them, I love making baby quilts because they're small and sew up super easily.  The binding only takes a couple hours to complete and my wrists don't hurt nearly as much as they would with a throw-size quilt.  So, friends and family, keep having babies, because I have a stash to work through!

I wrapped the quilt up this morning and forgot to take pictures with anything besides my phone.  Sorry, world.

Isn't that awesome calligraphy?  I would love to say it's mine but that would be a huge lie.  I bought it on Etsy from Parrot Design Studio and thought it was perfect for a little girl.

Is there anything better than a crinkly quilt?  I don't think so.  This finished drying after I went to bed last night so I grabbed it as soon as I woke up this morning.  I love it!  I ended up binding with a print from Ellen Luckett-Baker's Moda line Quilt Blocks, which was released last spring.  I forgot I had it in my stash but the crosses in the print mimic the crosses in the quilt.  I was worried about how the backing and binding looked together but after staring at them for a long period of time I can say it's really grown on me.

I posted this to my Facebook wall and a girl I haven't spoken to since sixth grade contacted me about making one for her!  She's due with her second baby, a boy, next month and loved the style.  First of all, let's try not to focus on the fact that she's my age (younger, actually, because I was always the oldest in my class) (until I graduated, but that's another story for another blog) and having her second child.  Second, how great is that!  I love hearing that people like what I'm doing.  That sounds narcissistic, but in 2013, we put ourselves out there a lot, and it's hard to keep going if you aren't getting feedback.

I will say that I am having a hard time charging her for it.  This isn't my design; I used a pattern while making this.  So I told her if she'll buy the supplies--around $40 is what I spent--I'll do it and send it to her.  Is that weird?  I don't like the topic of money and would rather barter, but because I'm not in the market for a newborn, I'll just take what I can get: experience and maybe some fabric scraps to add to my stash.

What'd you sew this weekend?  Ariel and I had an awesome Skype session Saturday and we have some big plans for the blog!  I hope you'll be as excited as we are!

An Almost-Finished Baby Quilt!

Finally--a productive weekend in the Sposetta-Regnier household!  I tell you, these lazy Sundays bore me to death.

Last weekend I wrote about plans for a baby quilt for a co-worker.  I was torn about the cross design.  Finally, I decided to just do it.  If I sat around and thought about it anymore I was going to drive myself crazy!  However, this quilt didn't move nearly as fast as my other quilts have recently.  It was also a ton of piecing: each block is made of eleven pieces, and there are 39 blocks in the baby quilt.  It's much more involved than my HSTs and basic patchwork!

As a reminder, the pattern is Cluck Cluck Sew's Inside Out.  I bought this pattern when I first decided to learn how to quilt and have been dying to make it ever since.  I love cross quilts!  The solids are all from Hawthorne Threads and are a mix of Cotton Couture, Bella Solids, FreeSpirit Designer solids, and one Laura Gunn Painter's Canvas.  I've found lately that I love working with solids and really enjoy adding the leftovers to my stash.

I started cutting Monday night and stopped working on it Sunday morning.  All I have left to do is quilt and bind! We'll talk about that after the pictures.

I chain-pieced many of the block parts.  This was my first time chain-piecing and, while I learned a new skill, it made piecing the blocks later so boring and tedious.

Laying this out was a labor of love.  I didn't make equal numbers of all the colors, and had a very specific vision in mind: I didn't want the same color touching in any of the rows, and I wanted the values to be equally spread out.  So at 11 PM Saturday night, after Nick was asleep and my internet had decided to stop working (rendering Hulu useless), I finally got it right!

I was up early on Sunday to photograph it:

Puddin' helped me baste (and thoroughly pissed me off in the process):

So now the quilt is rolled up in a tube, waiting to be quilted!

Which brings me to the question, how should I quilt it?  I don't have a free-motion quilting foot yet, which puts a damper on that plan.  I also can't do straight lines, because, with this sort-of wonky layout, it will look like I'm drunk or dumb, take your pick.  My mom suggested I quilt inside and outside the crosses, which I like.  I also saw wavy lines done with a walking foot (amazing and mind-blowing, at least to me) on Camille Roskelley's blog and am leaning toward that.  Do you have any suggestions?

What did you quilt this weekend?