Full of Soup

My mom made me this quilt in the winter in 2006.

I took some photos of it on the East River during the snow storm a couple weeks ago.

After I started quilting she was worried that I would notice all the little mistakes in her quilts.

But the idiosyncrasies are my favorite part. There is a part of one heart where she ran out of the red fabric she was using and substituted a very similar patterned color. I loved finding this and knowing this about my quilt.

She sent it out to have it quilted. I really like the different types of quilting on different parts of the quilt.

Here is the quilt in its typical home.

In January I took a class at City Quilter on machine quilting. I machine quilted Gwendo’s quilt prior to the class, but I used a walking foot to create a meandering line, which I now know was definitely the hard way. The introduction to machine quilting workshop gave me a lot of practice using the walking foot for STRAIGHT lines.

She also showed us how to make a quilt sandwich using two pieces of muslin and batting and then how to baste the sandwich using safety pins. I am really interested in machine quilting some of my lap-sized quilts, but I wanted to test the waters with a smaller project.

I began by taping the back of my quilt (right side down) to a large, hard surface. The instructor suggested using tables pushed together at a local school or community space because the floor is bad for your back. I prefer the comfort of home and am lucky enough to have just enough square footage of hardwood to do this project.

The bottom layer should be pulled taught. The second layer is the batting.

This is the cottony layer that makes the quilt warm and fluffy. This layer doesn’t need to be tight, just smooth.

I use Quilters Dream, which is a really soft all-cotton batting that is easy to sew through. I could also get away with quilting my lines far apart using this high-quality batting. I probably could’ve gone with a more budget brand since this quilt which will most likely be hung up or tossed around and not used for warmth.

Finally I laid the quilt top on the sandwich and smoothed it out flat. Here’s where my mistakes started!

I’m using an orange thread that will show up brightly on the back and front so I didn’t want to just stitch in the ditch. I planned to quilt a quarter inch in from the seam so the quilt would have a lot of little boxes within boxes. That is why I placed all the pins in the center of the squares.

When pinning the quilt, you are supposed to start in the center and move outwards.

I used curled safety pins to pin the quilt. These work well because as soon as you pop them in, they are curved up to pop back out. The label also promises they are “quilt safe.”

However, when I took them out:

Also, after I put them in, I realized the patchwork of the quilt seemed kind of web-like, and I decided to go with that theme and quilt a bunch of diagonal lines to make the orange thread look like a spider web across the whole quilt.

I wasn’t brave enough to wing it, so I had to draw guide lines AFTER I pinned it.

With the lines in place, quilting it actually happened pretty quickly.

Again, I started in the center and moved outwards.

I was able to finish the top in one rainy afternoon. The results look good from a distance, which is usually my goal.

Up close, I was unhappy with how the knots looked where the sewing started and stopped. The workshop leader said we could just shorten our stitch length as we got to the end, but I think even stitching is important throughout the quilt. I ended up just setting my stitch length to zero at the end and getting these balled up knots. I am not sure what the proper way to start and end a machine quilted stitch, but it’s something I definitely have to figure out before I put some of my more complex quilts under the needle.

Overall, I’m very happy with this little buddy. I got the goblin wizard panels and coordinating fabrics from a Quilt Show on Long Island this summer. I got the solids from The Cambridge Quilt Shop and the people helping me there were awesome. I went there with no real pattern in mind, but they were able to give me the right amount of fabric to make this all work.

I am tucking this away until it is closer to Halloween when I will curse having to work on the binding to finish it off.

I am not very good at keeping plants alive and my cats only complicate things by eating the leaves and knocking the pots over, but I would love to have a bunch of plants all over my apartment.

Terrariums seem like a great solution because they only need to be watered about once a month and they are covered. I purchased a wide mouthed round candy dish with a lid at Junk in Williamsburg a few weeks ago and bought a second wide mouth kitchen storage jar from Target to start my collection.

My sister hooked me up with some moss from her front yard this week, and last night I was able put everything together very quickly. I filled the bottom of the jars with peat moss, slapped the moss still attached to some dirt and rocks on top of that and watered them. My sister sculpted some decorations out of polymer clay and voila!

Here is the candy dish terrarium. The bottom glass has waves in it, so I filled that mostly with dirt so the plants and sculptures would sit above the rim

My sister made this guy. He’s perfect. The camera really does not do him justice. He is wearing green shoes with curled toes! 

I made the mushroom after she demonstrated how to make one.

It was hard for me to capture how it looks with the lid because of the glare from the light. Had to be there!

This frog buddy lives in the second terrarium. Can you CHECK that sweet moss? I’m going to have to look into what kind of moss this is because it’s super green and grassy instead of the dark short stuff I was expecting.

Green mushroom!

I got that rock in the South Dakota Badlands on a cross-country road trip Anthony and I took in 2002.

From the outside.

I had a great time making these and I was surprised how easy and inexpensive it was to add some green to my apartment. I have a lot of different types of rocks and shells I’ve collected on trips and I think this is a great way to display them. If you (or your sister) aren’t a skilled sculptor this is also a great place to put plastic super heros or old McDonald’s toys.