This is the follow-up to Making a Beginner Doll Quilt, Part 1. Unfortunately some of the subsequent steps in making this doll quilt were done when it was late and I was too tired and ditzy to remember to take pictures. I'll do my best to explain the steps I followed, but as I mentioned in Part 1, I made a lot of mistakes, and you'll do a better job if you follow the basic beginner's quilting instructions in Gloria's Quilting Tutorial that I mentioned in the first installment. The idea of this post is to show you how easy it was, and how well it turned out, considering I did it the "quick, dirty and lazy" way!
After finishing the patchwork portion of the quilt top, cut your borders to the proper length. I chose to do two borders, one in the green lattice print, and one in the lavender. I wanted the finished green border to be 1" wide, so I added an extra 1/2" to the width when cutting, for the seam allowance on either side of the border. This made it 1.5" wide. The length of the border is dependent on the length of the finished patchwork portion of the quilt top. If your quilt top is 20" long, and your first border is 1.5" wide (before attaching), then make the border at least 23" long (allowing 1.5 inches of overhang on each end, for attaching to the borders on the sides of the quilt. Fearful of making a mistake, I left even more at each end, to be trimmed off later. I cut the borders for the two shorter sides also, leaving plenty of overhang at each end again.
I sewed the green borders on each long side of the quilt top first, with right sides together and a 1/4" seam allowance, as usual, then pressed the seam allowances to one side. (I had that part figured out at that point, lol.) Then I sewed on the borders for the shorter side, continuing the stitching right over the ends of the already-
attached borders, and pressed them again. (Here you see the first green border piece sewn on and ready to be pressed.)
I trimmed the extra length off each corner of the border, and then continued to follow the same steps to attach the lavender border pieces to the green border. This time I wanted a 2" border, so the cut width was 2.5". (In this picture, the bottom left corner of the green border has been trimmed, while the other three await trimming.)
Your quilt top is completed! On to the "quilt sandwich". The next step can be done on your cutting board if it's big enough, using a rotary cutter. Otherwise lay it on any large flat surface, such as your living room floor, as you would with any larger quilt. This may not be exactly how the pros do it, but this was my method:
I used an old blanket instead of batting, since it won't matter to a doll if her quilt is warm enough. ;-) I first cut a section of the old blanket a little bigger than the quilt top, and laid it on the cutting board. I then laid the quilt top on top of it, and used the rotary cutter and ruler to cut the blanket to the same size as the quilt top. I removed the top and "batting", and laid the backing fabric on the cutting board, right side down. The batting was laid on top, and the quilt top, right side up, on top of that.
Then I used curved quilting safety pins (so much easier to work with) to carefully pin-baste through all the layers of the quilt. They should be placed evenly to keep the layers from shifting. You may choose to baste with a needle and thread, to avoid bending a sewing machine needle should you accidentally run over a pin with it. I'll let you figure out how I know that. :-) There are many ways to baste a quilt, including using fusible webbing and spray adhesive. From what I read, the spray adhesive is the easiest, but after my own research, I felt that the sprays weren't the way to go, for me. In the future I'll probably machine-baste.
Oh, just to let you know...at this point, I realized that I had to un-pin the quilt sandwich, because I had planned on embroidering a dedication message and the label information directly onto the backing, instead of doing it on a quilt label. Either way, it's probably easiest to do that before doing the sandwich. A quilt label can include a dedication, a story about the quilt, the name of the quilter, the place and date it was quilted, etc. You should at least include something that could help you identify the quilt in case it becomes lost or stolen.
Believe it or not, quilts have been stolen from church displays, quilt shows, nursing homes, storage units, and even burglarized from people's homes. A nicely-done quilt can go for $500-$1000, and smart thieves or unethical collectors know this. Even if the theft is just coincidental and your quilt isn't worth much--say, a thief uses it to wrap up and cart off the stuff he stole from your home--you'll be sad just the same. There are actually missing quilt sites dedicated to trying to reunite quilt owners with their missing quilts. So label your creation!
I wanted to label mine in such a way that the label couldn't be removed (even though it's just a doll quilt). So mine is machine embroidered on the backing. Don't look too closely--I had some first-timer issues with it. The thread broke for the first letter of the dedication, and for the creator label, I chose too-small type because I was too lazy to test out the second part, like I did the first. Live and learn! I also didn't choose the best spot for the embroidery, and the dedication was slightly crooked.
(I forgot to take a picture of the embroidered back before the sandwiching and quilting. These pictures were taken part way through the process of the machine quilting, as you can see by the circular quilting design on part of the fabric. The odd camera angle was to avoid including personal information on the quilt labeling in the photos. I could have done it closer-up, but then you'd see how bad it looked!)
Soon (hopefully) to come in the third and final installment...quilting the quilt.
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