Mini Makeovers

Happy New Year!



With the New Year we have a little room redo going on at our house ~ but this time the renovation is on a small scale.

My daughter wanted some bedding for her dolls and that gave me an excuse to go to town and really make some fun doll bedding. Doll quilts are a perfect way to practice stipple quilting which is a new (to me) technique I just learned using the doll quilts to practice on (more on that later). Meanwhile here are the bedding sets - complete with matching teeny tiny throw pillows and shams.

How cute are these?
Yeah I'm tooting my own horn but seriously, these are so stinkin' cute I just want to crawl right into that bed. Did I mention teeny tiny throw pillows? I'm overcome by the cuteness.



Oh to be a kid again....

Happy Sewing!

ADDENDUM

I really shouldn't write blog-posts when it's late at night I'm dog tired. Here is some detail info that I neglected to put in above:

The strip quilt (purple/aqua) is just random widths of strips i put together. My finished quilts needed to be 22X20 to fit the bed properly and giving them about a 4-5" overhang on either side. So I was aiming for that size. My bed size is about 22X10 - so my 'mattress' covers where that size. The block pieced quilt (green) is loosely based on this great tute from Alissa at Sew Mama Sew. I used 3.5" squares and then added a border width that would fit my finished size. The flower quilt (pink) was made by cutting bias strips of coordinating fabrics and then gathering them using my ruffler set at 1 for lots of tight ruffles/pleats. These were arranged to make the flower and then pinned and sewn into place. The ruffles fluffed up nicely in the wash and almost have a chenille look to them. I drew on the quilt top to loosely follow the flower outline and then quilted that using my darning foot.

Fabrics used:
Strip quilt: Farmer's Market (Sandi Henderson), Cloe's Imagination (Tina Givens), Olive Rose (Valori Wells), Michael Miller dots
Block quilt: Pop Garden (Heather Bailey), Olive Rose (Valori Wells), Mezzanine (Patty Young), Michael Miller dots
Flower quilt: Soiree (Lila Tueller), Mezzanine (Patty Young)

Quilting success!

So I've always considered myself to be an anti-quilter. What's that you say? Yes it's true - most traditional quilt patterns are just so not my style and after a disasterous attempt about 20 years ago, I decided to shelve it. Quilts and I were not to be friends. But I've been sewing for decades and just recently decided to give quilting another thought. I do like the designs I've seen with some of the newer and more modern designers on the block.

Like most sewists I'm amassing a huge collection of scraps which I refuse to part with and as my daughter grows older - aka less interested in wearing my cute designs - I needed a new outlet for the fabulous fabrics I see all the time, not to mention the scraps! So I decided, that in my years, (sheesh I'm starting to sound like a geriatric) I've learned a thing or two about sewing and I certainly realize that I might be a more skilled sewist now than 20 years ago - oh and I have nicer machines than I used to. So empowered with that knowledge and an "I refuse to fail" attitute, I decided to revisit the quilting world.

I made my first quilt top last night. Totally winging it - I like that approach - I just flipped around online until I saw something I liked and went at it. A friend who quilts, had suggested starting small - so I decided to work on a doll quilt. My daughter had just recently requested a blanket for her dolls bed - so this seemed like a marriage made in heaven. Here's the top - awaiting quilting, that's next. Still trying to decide whether I should go with the easy straight stitch quilt, or something more free flowing. Apparently now I also need new tools. BSR or walking foot?? I like the idea of the stitch regulator (BSR) because having tried the free-motion quilting approach with my darning foot, I can tell you this method is not for me - my initial attempts were horrendous - the BSR sounds like the solution to my problem, plus an easier way to do it - and I'm about making things easy. Have to visit a dealer and figure out if this will work on my machine.

Ok onto the next part, not having any special quilting tools on hand, I ended up using my embroidery machine to stipple the star pattern onto the quilt. So a little cheat I suppose. It was thin enough that I was able to hoop it without a problem. I free-handed the wavy pattern along the border using a water-soluble marker. I used a very thin layer of cotton quilt batting - thin enough that I was able to sew on it with my ordinary presser foot and I reduced the tension a bit to account for the increased thickness of the piece. This worked great on a small sized quilt such as this one and no puckering. Finally, I used crazy mom quilt's handy dandy binding tute to finish it off.

Here she is:



Do you think the dolls will be pleased?