Safari Quilt and Owner

There you go:

Progress Report II:

Baby still safely locked away in Mummy's womb, only nine days overdue. She'll be induced tomorrow ... in the meantime, I am racing against time to finish the quilt, hoping to have enough time to add a letter each to the solid light blue block. It'll be an H and an M, her first and middle name initials, which have the added benefit of mirroring perfectly: an H is an H, no matter which side you look at it from.

I'm spending a week working with the parents of the Safari Quilt recipient and hope to shoot a publishable photo for display on this side, so watch this space.

Taa daa ....

I hope you can make out the "centre piece", a quilted sun.

Almost done

Tonight I will finish the quilting on my Safari Baby Quilt. It'll be washed on Friday for it to be presentable and usable on Sunday June 3rd, when I plan to gift it to a boy named Ferdinand Johannes.

Dreadline, hold on, no, deadline

But I dread it! My husband has booked a trip to go see the recipient on June 3rd. I must be done by then. But with just the quilting to finish - should take me about five evenings - and the whole thing to be washed, I should be fine, I hope.

All was well ... as you can tell ...

and I was very pleased ... until I turned the bugger over and saw ...



WRINKLES!!! Way more wrinkles than I could possibly bear.



So I undid all my quilting and painstakingly tacked and pinned the top to the fleece backing. It now looks like I actually know what I'm doing. I hate it when I think I can get away with skipping a step and then don't ...

By the way, the baby is one day shy of four weeks old now.

Quilting away ...

This is a tiny bit unwieldy at the moment but I am happily quilting along the lines my quilting pencil has now decided to leave behind on my fabric.

Sailing right along ...

I'm quite pleased with how the "body" of the sun turned out. I "measured" the middle of the quilt and folded away the outer third of the yellowy centre. Then I got out a dinner plate as stencil, plonked that down, circled it with a quilting pen, got out my embroidering frame and off I took.

Now I need to work on the sun beams. I will do a variation on below's sun with straight and curvey beams alternating and a total of eight beams. All I need to do now is figure out how to make myself a pattern to pin down.

Making my stencil

Then again, maybe not!

This is the throw I was talking about:



And the sun is way fussier that I remembered. I think I may have to design my onw based on this.

Happily quilting along ...

that seems to be the current theme here. Once I got my act together and assembled the whole thing, I could move to things I like better about quilting. I've rearranged all the animal panels along the grassy border and am currently appliqué-ing them.



And then, there is that small matter of the sun pattern to be dealt with. When I'm all done, I think I'll have problems letting go of it.

Simultaneous Engineering

Currently I'm working on two quilts at the same time ...



The Safari themed baby quilt whose receiver is due in late April and my lap quilt that is due whenever ...



The baby quilt is moving along fine now that I finally broke out my sewing machine and started assembling it. Until earlier this weekend, I had busied myself mainly with pinning and prepping, but now I'm getting a bit spooked because time is getting away from me here. I'll finish machine-assembly tonight and then I'll hand-applique the animals and have a think about the dimensions of the quilted sun that's to go into the centre. Wish me luck!

PS: as you can see, the most important thing's already in place - my label!

Baby Quilt 1: lay-out done

With the "help" of my girls, I've finalised the lay-out on the first baby quilt. As the discerning reader will notice, it is still lacking the "pampa" fabric, which is yellow and earmarked for the centre. It was off to be ironed, back today, and will now determine the actual size of my oeuvre, together with the yellow fleece.

Baby Quilt 1

This is the material for my first baby quilt of the year. I purchased it years ago and always had it earmarked for our friends' baby. Our friends are the couple through whom my husband and I met. They were our witnesses at our civic wedding ceremony and have tried to conceive this child for many years. Well, the day finally came and she is due in late April. So, time to crack on!

Her parents emigrated to Namibia about eight years ago, hence the African theme. The animals will be applied to the grass fabric that will frame the desert / tampas fabric in the middle. The centre piece will be a quilted sun.



I'm still undecided whether to keep the back bare, just the fleece that would otherwise be the wadding. I'm thinking the bare fleece will give more warmth. And the whole thing is off to be washed now.