Duck Quilt for Nephew

My sister came to me with this unique vintage duck fabric and asked me to make her son a quilt. She brought along a fiery orange (looks red in these pics to me) to coordinate with it and a cuddle fabric in a lighter orange for the back. Her son, like most kiddies I know, LOVE soft fabric.

My goal with this quilt was to both highlight the ducks and do a lot of machine quilting. The duck fabric was a little hard to work with because the patterns didn't cut easily into specific sizes hence the profuse use of sashings in varying widths. The large center panel was quilting diagonally in one direction while all the individual ducks were quilted in varying sizes of squares and rectangles. My sewing machine embroiders letters so I used it to make my quilt label.

A trick I used on this quilt was to do a "false back". You'll notice in the second picture that you're not seeing any quilting on the back. That is because I used cotton fabric as the false back that was quilted and then simply stitched the cuddly orange fabric to the back around the edges followed by adding the binding. I did this to preserve full cuddliness. Plus, the false back looked "interesting" with all the random stitching.

Mario Quilt For My Brother

This past year, 2011, for Christmas I had my younger brother for our Christmas gift exchange. I saw a version of this quilt online and decided it would be perfect for him. I created my own pattern using Adobe Illustrator. I bought all the fabric and batting at JoAnns', generally buying each fabric one at a time and using their 40 or 50% off coupons. I had the whole year to work on this quilt so there was no time crunch. The total cost came to approximately $60 including the fabric, batting, and thread. The squares 1-1/2" cut size then sewn with a 1/4" seam. I quilted it myself with a walking foot on my machine. The quilting on this one was very simple- horizontal lines stitched in the ditch every 4". I included a label on the back that had my brother's name, that I made the quilt, and that it was for Christmas 2011. The quilt measures 60 x 64.

I will get a pdf version of my pattern ready so if you're interested, email me and I'll send it your way!

P.S. my brother loves this quilt!