Jack-Jack's Quilt

It's a lovely day in the neighborhood today! I'm deluding myself that spring is just around the corner and pretty soon it will be all bright and sunshiny outside again! Whatever it takes to get through the day, right?

This weekend I finished my quilt for my coworker, which makes it my first completed quilt of 2014!!! I actually started and finished a quilt in the first month of the new year - pretty awesome-sauce if you ask me! We'll overlook the fact that it was a baby quilt and a pretty easy pattern at that :)

I'm calling this one "Jack-Jack's Quilt" because 1) the baby's name will be Jack and 2) I love the little baby from The Incredibles named Jack-Jack and 3) I'm not feeling clever enough to come up with a really creative name.

    




I ended up pulling the stitches from the top row and resewing the top row on the other side of the block and that fixed the problem that I was having. It might've taken help from my super-smart hubster to figure that out, but it worked like a charm! I was ready to throw in the towel and consider it done.

I quilted it in straight lines running from corner to corner. I had intended to then go the other way to end up with a grid, but by the time I got done with the first set of lines, I fell out of love with that idea.

I love the texture that all those lines produces!! The only concern I had was bunching; I'm not sure if I didn't baste well enough or if it was the shot cottons that I used, but I ended up with some bunches in between the lines. It added to the whole look of the quilt, and feels super-neat, but I'm not sure if that is normal or if something was off on my end of things.

Anyway, the end result is that I was able to finish it the day before my coworker left; I feel so accomplished and I kind of wanted to keep the quilt for myself - maybe I'll keep the next one I work on instead!

 

Doh!

So this here is a little story about what happens when you are too tired to sew straight, but you decide to be stubborn and sew anyway. I have learned that what seems to look right doesn't always end up being right.

Case in point.

From this post, I went ahead and made a baby quilt for my coworker. I totally wasn't going to do it, but then it turns out that she is resigning in a just a week to be a stay-at-home mommy. On the one hand, that's super good for her family, because then she'll be with them much more than she is now. On the other hand, it is an income loss for her family. Like, quite a bit of an income loss. And when I thought through all of that, there is no way I wasn't going to make her a quilt, because it just felt right.

So, my mom made my little Boy#2 a quilt for Christmas and I loved the pattern for it, which she found in one of my quilting magazines. Seriously, this pattern whips up in no time flat and is pretty cute to boot. I think I'll have to make it again.

So here it is. Looks pretty good, right?







Notice anything funny about it?

Like how I might have sewn two parts of it backwards?

And now it doesn't look good at all?

I'm trying to figure out a way to rearrange it so I don't have to unpick and resew anything, but somehow I don't think that is going to work for me...

Back to the drawing board...