Birthday Card Quilt

Wow, it's been a good while since I posted anything. I have excuses, but the most relevant one is that I'm busy enjoying the summer with my kids. But I did want to post about this project.

At the beginning of the month I mentioned that I was machine quilting my first quilt. Well, it was this big "Birthday Card Quilt" for my mom. 

As you can see, my mom just turned 50. Our family always has a pot luck breakfast to celebrate the 4th of July. This year, we turned it into a surprise birthday party for Mom! 

Everyone ate, played and of course, signed the quilt.

It was my mom who taught me how to sew and to piece quilt. I knew she would appreciate the work it took to make. It was a fun project for me because I was able to take ideas from blogs I love and sketch out a one-of-a-kind blanket just for Mom.

Don't you love the crazy scribbles of sketching? Ignore the math...

After I figured out just how I wanted to do it, I made the back first. I kind of based it off of this beautiful quilt over at Noodlehead. (I actually took a lot of advice from this post by Anna, about her quilt.)

And the front was based off of this adorable baby quilt by V and Co.

I used picnik.com to print out the letters. There were large enough, and enough of them, that I needed two pages. The first one, I printed normal and had to trace on the back of them to get the backwards on my Heat 'n' Bond. But then I remembered that picnik has a feature where you can reverse the images. So I did that for the second page. It just makes it less likely to mess up if they are already backward for you.

Anyway, I traced the letters backward on the Heat 'n' Bond, then ironed them onto the wrong side of my fabric.

 Then I cut them out, peeled the back, pinned and then ironed them into place.

Because Heat 'n' Bond will eventually dissolve, I stitched the letters down with the blanket stitch function on my machine.

I used the sandwich tutorial from Oh Fransson! to make this:

So many safety pins! I used regular safety pins, instead of "quilting pins".

I then used this tutorial for straight-line machine quilting. I used masking tape, and spaced them 2 inches apart, because it was easy with my 2-inch-wide ruler.

I sewed along the edge like I was told...

When it came to the words, I taped right across them, and then just back stitched at the beginning and end, just skipping over them.

For the binding I used this tutorial by Crazy Mom Quilts. The tutorial was easy to follow, and I chose to hand quilt it for a nice clean look.

Happy Birthday, Mom. I love you!