make a belly-time quilt for my baby nephew

This is the small belly-time quilt, all finished.
I added a frame to it (one line on top and bottom, two on each side).
Then, I brought the 3 layers (front, filling and black/brown back fabric) together, finishing it off with a light blue basting.
I shall mail it off tomorrow.

I’ve cut out the pieces for the frame and arranged them. I reckon it’s still too small, but if that’s the case, I can add more edge in plain brown.

During the week end, I was working on the front again. After lots of re-doing of badly done seams, I finally finished connecting the first 144 blocks. They look great, but the surface came out a lot smaller than I intended as I was very generous with leaving lots of seam allowance on the back side. So I decided to add a frame, with one line of blocks on the top and bottom and two on each side, so it will be wider and a bit higher. So I will be spending a few more evenings on doing that, probably tonight just cutting out the bits I need before starting to sew again.
I hope I have finished this before Elias has outgrown it. It’s a race against time…

I connected 11 scarves. I had to rip the seams of two of them and then re-sew them because I mixed them up and only noticed when I had them both connected. Bugger! When I had connected scarf no.11 to no.10, I saw that that seam is not well done and does swallow too much of a triangle’s corner, so I have to open that one up again, too. But I lost my get-up-and-go, so I stopped for today.

I think I might be able to connect them all during the coming days and finish the whole project next week.
My biggest “fear” is that the diagonal pieces won’t line up to make proper diamonds (not shown on this excell sheet). If that’s the case, and I can’t help it much, I’ll leave it as is. I have taken out many seams and resewn them. After all, I am still learning… The weird thing is though that I seem to break one sewing needle a day!

I only have to do one more row of horizontal seams, then I can start connecting the scarves vertically.Woohoo!

It relaxes me. I also feel very happy when I can make something with my own hands and see it grow in front of me. I have now 6 long rows of 8 pieces each connected, the rest are still in pairs or rows of 4. I had to re-do a few of the pairs, because they weren’t straight. The excell sheet I pasted in with this entry does on no way represent the colour scheme, or the pattern itself. It only shows the progress of connecting blocks…

I’ve cut out 144 blocks and arranged them to spell E, J and H, his initals and three diamonds. For the first time, I am doing diagonal blocks to make the rounding of the J’s bottom, and the diamonds. That seems to be going well.
I also sewed up the first two-block pairs, but out of 72, I have to re-do about 8, as the seams didn’t come out straight. The fabric seems to be sliding, and I am blaming the fact that I am using very “slidey” fabric, indeed.

After presenting my sister and her husband with their personal quilt, the first question was of course if they could let Elias lie on it. Well, honestly I would prefer if he didn’t at this point because the thing is quite delicate. But it’s theirs now and it’s practiced zen to let them treat it the way they like. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t make one just for Elias alone! he can spit, poo and puke on it and it should be fine. I hope ;o) . So yesterday, I made a design and couldn’t wait, so I also started cutting out the blocks.