Jungle Babies 4 For Isaiah

I made a simple baby quilt over the long Thanksgiving weekend.  This one was made for a brand new great nephew born the week before.  He's the only Isaiah I've ever known, except for Mr. Edwards    from "Little House on the Prairie".  I love the name, especially because its Biblical.  In fact, I had to look in my Bible to make sure I was spelling it right!

This is the FOURTH quilt I have made using the Jungle Babies fabric!  The first one I made was for my oldest grandson over 11 years ago!  I picked up pieces of the fabric when I would see it in a store over the years.  I may be able to make one more scrappy one from the leftovers! The date on the selvedge is 2006.

You can see the other 3 quilts I made from this fabric HERE, HERE and HERE.

Here are some pictures.   It was a rainy day, so I only have indoor pictures!

In the process of being quilted.

While making this quilt, I decided to keep up with my time.  I thought it would be interesting to see how long it took me to do each step in the quilt.  For most of the steps I wrote down my starting and stopping time, but a couple of them I had already completed and so I estimated those.  Keep in mind that this was a very simple baby sized quilt and so a larger, more complicated quilt would take much more time!

 Here are the results.

Cutting pieces for the top and sewing together (center panel and
three borders of different sizes, pressing as I sewed                                    2 hours

Cutting backing fabric and batting; Pressing top and backing in
preparation for pin basting -                                                                           1 hour

Pin Basting -                                                                                                     1 hour

Machine Quilting (41 X 41 quilt)   (meandering)                                         1 hour and 35 minutes

Trimming edges and squaring up corners                                                      15 minutes

Cutting fabric for binding, sewing strips together,
machine sewing the binding on the quilt, and hand sewing the
binding on the back of the quilt-                                                                     2 hours and 40 minutes

Making label-                                                                                                  1 hour and 10 minutes

Total -                                                                                                              9 hours and 40 minutes

Very interesting!  Now I can figure out how long it would take me to make a simple baby quilt, while fitting the work into small blocks of time before and after work and on the weekends or other days off work.

If I could do one hour a day, I should be able to finish a simple baby quilt in 9 to 10 days.  We will see if I can make that work!

Repairing and Patching an Old String Quilt

My daughter-in-law asked if I could patch up her Great Grandmother's quilt.  The quilt is in pretty bad shape with lots of holes (some big ones!) and stitches coming out all over the place.   Her request was that I just fix it so the damage wouldn't get any worse.

From a distance its a great scrap quilt:

This quilt is the perfect example of a REAL scrap quilt.  It contains every kind of fabric you can think of.  I'm pretty sure there are flour sacks in it, along with scraps from clothing.  Looks to me like nothing she had went to waste.  I love it!

Some of the different fabrics up close:

However, due to the age of the fabrics in the quilt, they are disintegrating in places.  The seams are coming apart in lots of places.  There is no way to restore the quilt, so patching and hand sewing loose seams was the only thing I could do.

The first thing I did was sit with this quilt in my lap while watching TV, and go over it bit by bit, clipping loose threads and strings of fabric that had frayed.  Any seams I could repair with needle and thread, I repaired.  Where there were big holes, I trimmed up the area and  repaired what I could, so that I could hand sew a patch over them.

A couple of the holes after I had trimmed them up in preparation for the patches:

There are a lot of red fabrics in the quilt, so I felt that the patches should be in red.  I found some muted red fabric in my stash.  I also used some beige calico fabric that I felt would would go with the vintage fabrics in the quilt.

A few of the patched areas:

The calico patch!

I love the pattern in this quilt and in fact, I made a small Christmas quilt in the same pattern many years ago.  The one I made is small and I use it as a tree skirt, or put in on display.  I would love to make more quilts like this.  This is the one I made:

Scrap quilts are my favorite and so repairing the old scrap quilt for my daughter-in-law was a labor of love.