Bloggers Quilt Festival - baby bunting quilt

Well this is the first time I've been organised enough to get anything entered into the Bloggers Quilt Festival which Amy's Creative Side is hosting. Such a great idea for a quilt festival I think!

I'm hoping to enter two quilts, and this is the first - a fairly small, hand-quilted one, in the Hand Quilted category. This quilt was made before I was a blogger, so this is also the first post about it. I did put photos of it on Flickr when it was finished, but took some new ones too for this festival.



Inspiration for this quilt came from a jelly roll I had never done anything with. I decided to put similar-colour strips together, then cut them into bunting. I did some rapid learning about how to sew triangles into straight rows too! I didn't have an overall plan to start with, so I made some bunting, joined it to white triangles, and stood back to have a look. To string the bunting I added Kona Sage strips - I pretty much made this quilt how I make most of my quilts, making them up as I go along, with no definite idea of how things will turn out!



Once the piecing was done and I'd chosen a backing, I hand quilted around the flags, along the top strips, and then in-between the flags with waves, to suggest them fluttering in the wind. All the quilting was done on a traditional frame with DMC perle cotton. The perle is lovely to work with, once you've found a needle which is fine and short enough to quilt with, but has a big enough eye to take the chunky thread.





Can't remember how long it took to quilt, but it was less time than the double-bed size one I'd hand quilted previously! Here's a picture of the entire front and back:





And one last picture for you showing the bunting, the quilting and the back. Enjoy the quilt festival!



Baby bunting quilt
Category: Hand quilted quilts
Machine pieced
Hand quilted with DMC perle thread

Nautical bunting

I made this a while ago, but for over a year I've been too lazy to iron it flat enough to photograph! It hangs in Thomas's room, as it was made for him.



These flags are exact replicas of those in the maritime International Code of Signals, and they spell his name, with his year of birth (2004) split either side - so in sequence, the flags are 2-0-T-H-O-M-A-S-0-4 (but actually are shown in a different order here!).



Each flag has a toggle at one side, and a loop of cord at the other, which is how the real ones are made. It means they can be joined in any order you like, to show any message you like. We don't often rearrange Thomas's, but for these photos I tried out a few different combinations.



The next photo shows two of the number flags, which rather than being square are more like pennants. All the flags are pieced from Kona cotton and have plain white backs. I'm thinking of making some for Kitty too, using the correct flag patterns but in non-traditional colours (to distinguish hers from her brothers) - I'm thinking pinks and greens, maybe with some prints.



Do look back soon to see if I've made any progress with Kitty's bunting!