A Sweet Friday Finish

Well, almost finished. We still need to find out the baby's name for the label, but for the most part, the Sweet Hearts baby quilt for my niece's friend (and my first attempt at quilting with this minky-type fabric) is done!

The quilting was as challenging as I expected, but not for the reasons I had imagined. I planned to do simple cross-hatching through the minky squares, to keep it as trouble-free as possible. Once I had that part finished (or so I thought), I realized that there was all kinds of stitch skipping going on on the back of the quilt and had to completely UN-sew everything I had done so far. (All of the diagonal lines you see here.)

Isn't this a gorgeous print? ("Fabulous Finds," a Stonehill Collection by Donna Wilder for Fabric Traditions © 2011) My niece chose all of the fabrics for this quilt. Such a unique and pretty combination! (If you like her style, I'm sure she'd love to have you check out her interior design website here and/or her blog here.)

I nearly pulled my hair out trying to figure out the stitch-skipping problem. I tried re-threading, a new needle, multiple tension adjustments, cleaned my machine (long overdue anyway)... NOTHING worked. Straight-stitching on the cotton sections went fine, but on the minky, skipped stitches. Finally, at the end of my rope, I decided to try my other machine, usually NOT the best quilting machine.

It had no problem at all with the minky. It wasn't the fabric, it was the machine. Lesson learned.

The rest of the quilting was done on my usual quilting machine. Stitch in the ditch around each heart, straight line quilting on the borders, and some free-motion daisies in the heart centers...

We originally planned to bind it in the red gingham, but in the end, went with a 1/2" single-fold binding of the minky, machine-stitched to the front, hand-stitched to the back. Again, it was a tad bit trickier to work with than the usual cotton, but I think it really adds a lot to the overall effect. Nice frame, nice balance of textures.

After the final wash and dry shrinkage, there was a little more skewing of the blocks than I'm used to, but it seems to work with the overall cushiness of the quilt.

My niece has only seen pictures so far, but she thinks her friend, the expectant mommy, "is going to flip out." LoL I hope they both will love it.

Linking up today with:
Sew & Tell Friday at Amylouwho's.
TGIFF, hosted today by Rhonda at Quilter in the Gap
Link a Finish Friday at Richard Quilts
Finish it Up Friday at Crazy Mom Quilts, and
Can I Get a Whoop Whoop? at Confessions of a Fabric Addict!

Thanks for visiting! ♥