A Little Girl In Paris Quilt
I present to you my most recent piece of fabric artwork, A Little Girl in Paris. My niece is 7 years old and absolutely loves anything that has to do with Paris, France, so when I came across this fabric I just couldn't help but make a quilt with it. I found the fabric at Wal-Mart of all places! It is made by the Waverly company, beautiful and cheap (only $3.97/yrd)! All of the coordinating fabric I also found at Wal-Mart.
So many quilters have different ways of making their quilts, you do a google search and you will find more ways than you have time to read, so what the heck let me add one more.
First steps for me are to iron the fabric and then make stacks of 5-7 pieces in whatever order you would like. I personally don't like to stick fabrics with the same color concentration next to each other. For this quilt I decided I wanted my finished squares to be 10.5 inches so I cut my strips at 4 inches. Depending on your quilt size and how many fabrics you have will be the deciding factor for how many strips you will need to cut all together.
The next step for me was to cut the strips into 4 inch squares. I did do more than these two strips but I wanted the picture to show that I had the strips divided into two sets.
Then I stacked them together alternating the sets. Once they are stacked together if you take the single top layer off of the pile you have to pieces already with right sides together. This for me saves time putting pieces together individually, and with them cut together it gives more precision when sewing.
With the pieces already together I started chain piecing and it went by so quick especially with the 1/4" foot with edge guide. I Love Love Love this foot because it makes the piecing uniform.
Below is a picture of the finished 9 patch with arrows showing which way I pressed the seems. This allows the seams to nest when putting the nine patch together.
Once I pieced everything together I laid it out on my kitchen table with the backing, batting and quilt top. Personally for me one of the things I like to use for my backing is a flat sheet. For this quilt I used Better Homes and Gardens 300 Thread Count twin sheet. I have found it is one of the cheapest and easiest options. For the whole sheet set I paid $17.88. If you take into account the average quilt will need 3 yards of backing (as long as it's more than 44 inches wide) at an average of $11/yd, you are saving around $12 going with the sheet set and you have a pillowcase that matches! One thing you do have to take into account is the quality of the sheet, I tried using the 200 thread count sheets from Wal-mart that you can buy individually and it didn't hold up very well but I have found that with the 300 Thread Count it holds up really well.
After getting a quick snack I came back to see that one of my cats, Roxy, was trying to claim the quilt for herself. She gave me a look of "what...did you think you were going to work on my quilt???"
And later as I was putting the binding on my other cat, Mack, decided that he wanted to cuddle up in the quilt while I was working on it. In case you didn't know it seems as though cats like all things quilting, they love to sleep on the fabric and batting and have fun with the thread.
Ohhhh...... the life of a cat!
For the quilting I just did a simple criss-cross over the nine patch. Any this is the part where you get to play with the fun stitches on you machine.
And here is the finished project!
I hope you were able to learn or gain something from this tutorial. If you have any questions please feel free to e-mail me at southernrubies@gmail.com or just leave a comment.
Happy Quilting