Quilt Reveal: Summer WIP It #1

If you haven’t signed up for my Summer WIP It Challenge, it’s not too late to join. You can sign up HERE. Check out my FREE Stuff page for more details on this event.

Watermelon Quilt #7 is finished, out of the WIP pile, and on my daughter’s bed where it belongs! I finished this one a few days late for our scheduled time frame. There was a little sewing machine crisis. I can’t completely blame it on that, but it definitely didn’t help. My favorite sewing machine ever, the Janome MC8200, had to go back to the factory for some repairs. I managed to wear out a part that doesn’t usually wear out, so the repair shop sent it to the factory to fix it. I do feel like I should take up for my 8200 since it is the best machine I’ve ever owned. I use this machine to piece AND quilt ALL/100% of my quilts. There were 80 of them last year and 56 the year before, mostly t-shirt quilts. So, I do make a LOT of quilts, and the 8200 held up to all that heavy duty sewing before having to go to the shop for anything other than routine servicing. It is a real workhorse!

I am very fortunate to have another big domestic machine that I was able to get a little bit of work done with while waiting not so patiently to get my good machine back, but it just couldn’t perform as well as the Janome. I ended up having to put it back in the box because the uncooperativeness was stressing me out even more. Anyway, I let all the stress get to me and ended up buying a Janome M7. So, I’m back at it now and managed to finish Watermelon Quilt #7!

A little bit about how I finished this one:

This one’s HUGE. One of my neurotic quilting fears is that I’ll make a quilt for someone that is the size they need BEFORE it shrinks and is too small for what they want AFTER it shrinks. So, I always try to make the quilts a little bigger than the size they need to be because cotton shrinks… I definitely overdid it a little with this one because it was a 102″x102″ top. This doesn’t sound too big, but on just a full size bed, it’s a big quilt.

I did have to franken-batt this one. I make a lot of quilts so I buy batting by the rolls. The queen size batting roll seems to be the best size as far as the most usable size for the majority of my quilts BUT every now and then I’ll make a really BIG quilt that the queen roll is wide enough for. So, I either have to go and get a prepackaged king size batting or make franken-batting. You can watch my Instagram tutorial on Franken-batting HERE.

I decided to quilt it with simple loops. I used black backing like she requested. I was able to find some wide backing fabric so I didn’t have the piece the backing. She didn’t make any specific requests for binding. So, I decided to go with purple binding and a yellow decorative stitch since those are the colors for the high school she just graduated from. That feels a little weird and sad to say that my daughter recently graduated from high school!

For the label, I decided to go with a hand-written one instead of one of my typical logo labels. I thought she would find it funny if I wrote the start and finish dates on the label with my personal message. I didn’t follow any of my normal tips for labels in this one, but I do have a post on the hows and whys of labeling your quilts HERE.

I did manage to surprise her with this one despite my best efforts to ruin the surprise. I layed it out on the kitchen floor to be sure my backing and batting were big enough. I did this while she was sitting in the living room. She came to my sewing area and talked to me WHILE I was quilting it and again while I was attaching the label. Despite all this she didn’t notice I was working on her quilt and was genuinely surprised when I actually finished it. When I got it out of the dryer, I told her I had something she needed to put up. The quilt was folded backing out with the label on top. She looked at it and asked me what it was, and I told her to read the label. After that, it clicked, and I helped her put her new quilt on her bed!

Some things I’d like to do for Month 2 of our challenge:

I do want to do a post featuring some of your finished WIPs. So, an email will go out to everyone signed up for the challenge about this. I’d like to have a picture of your finished quilt, and if you have a story behind it, I’d love to put that in the post as well. I’ll credit you as the maker and link to your instagram if you want me to.

I’d also like to do a post on quilting. When I asked what steps you’d like to see some blog posts on, that’s one of the steps that came up.