Houndstooth Baby Quilt

I finished sewing the binding onto the houndstooth baby quilt yesterday.

I'm really pleased with how it turned out. I love how the outlines of the animals on the back are the same colours as the dots on the black fabric. I also like how the animal outlines look like those "Silly Bands".

When I went to the fabric store to buy the binding fabric, it took me a long time to decide what colour to use. The green fabric didn't exactly match the elephant's colour, the gold wasn't quite right for the bear's colour. There was a nice, deep purple fabric but there are only purple dots on the front but not any purple animals on the back. So I decided on the yellow. It was an exact match for the giraffe colour and a good contrast for the white and black on the front.

With my new machine, I can do a bit of embroidery using letters so I stitched the baby's name at each corner.

... and more close up...

I was going to do the whole border like that but it didn't hold the edge of the binding down so I hand-stitched the binding on. Normally I would have sewn the binding onto the front of the quilt and handstitched the other edge onto the back but I initially had hoped to machine stitch it all binding back to front. But when I tried machine-stitching the binding onto the front, it looked really crappy so I took it out and handstitched it.

I learned a lot doing this quilt. I learned that I probably should have used invisible thread for the quilting of the front because it was impossible not to have the white machine-quilting stitches show up on the black. Owen's mother is a skilled seamstress so I hope my machine-quilting doesn't drive her crazy. I learned that I should have sewn the binding onto the front and then handstitched it on the back instead of the other way around. I learned how to use the stitch memory on my new sewing machine, enabling me to do the personalizing.

I went to a 'tent sale' at a sewing shop in Oshawa on Saturday. I picked up some nifty fabric on sale to make Skip a pair of boxer shorts for lounging around the house.

I also did a wonky personalized label machine-stitching the letters onto twill tape. The apostrophe looked crappy so I picked out its stitches.

The sewing shop also runs lots of classes and doesn't discriminate by sewing machine company even though they are Husqvarna, Baby Lock and Janome dealers. If I see something interesting in their fall offerings, I'll be signing up for sure.

Now, back to some knitting...