Some more baby quilts

My good friend Ziza recently went from being a grandmother of 3 beautiful grandchildren to being the grandmother of 5. That’s pretty impressive. She had two new additions to the family just a month apart. Time for me to do some quilting.

It’s such a blessing to be able to make baby quilts. I’ve been having a ton of fun with them. As an added touch to personalize the quilts, I include the baby’s name and birthday. For the last couple that I’ve made, I’ve gone even a bit further.

I love piecing quilts together. I love free motion quilting. For me, it’s really hard to decide what I like better. I guess it depends on my mood. I find free motion quilting to be more creative of the two. There are a lot of patterns that tell you how to piece a quilt, but there isn’t much out there to tell you how to actually quilt it. I often find myself living with quilt tops until I know what I want. As soon as I do, the actual quilting goes easy.

These two quilts screamed out to me on how to quilt them. Fish need to be in the water, so a water type background filler just made a lot of sense. Leah Day has a great video on how to do it (as well as a ton of videos on how to do practically any free motion quilting pattern you can think of.) I quilted scales on the fish, which I think was a nice touch.

For the starburst quilt, it just made sense for me to do dot-to-dot quilting, ala Angela Walters for each of the points. They all burst out from the center. I used a dense filler in the background to make the points stand out better.

The younger of Ziza’s two new grandsons is named Kerem, which translates to vineyard. I had a bit of fun with it and quilted a tree in one of the background areas. Instead of quilting the name, I decided to hand embroider it.  There is no good way to get thin lines that aren’t connected with free motion quilting without a ton of starting and stopping. I actually tried to do it that way, but it just didn’t come out all that nice.

For the fish quilt, I used a bubble type of lettering, which I was able to quilt nicely. That was much easier to do because all the letters are connected. It’s a bit of a problem if you want to use Hebrew on quilts – even script letters aren’t connected.

I hope to be quilting a new quilt that should be ready for November. My daughter-in-law is pregnant with their second child. Rumor has it that they are having a girl. Having only one grandson, I have a lot of blue fabric. B’sha tova, it’s time to go out and buy some pink!