Puppy Cuteness

In an ongoing effort to use up pre-cut fabrics I’ve been given, I pulled out all the puppy fabrics, intending to make a twin-size quilt.

Puppy fabric pre-cuts.

I found a quilt on Pinterest that I thought would work with these mixed-size pieces — four-patches alternated with sashed large squares (and of course I can’t find it now). 

These fabrics had a cartoonish quality and I felt like I needed to match that when I bought some new fabrics to supplement, and I could only find one that I thought fit in.  And I had recently read that “millennial gray” was no longer popular, and that brown was now the more fashionable neutral, so I picked a nice dotted brown for sashing.

Newly purchased dog fabric and brown for sashing. I had one other dog fabric, and a bunch of geometrics, that I used as well.

There was plenty of brown in the dog fabrics, but somehow the brown sashing did not tie in with them well, and at this point, I really hated it.

The quilt center.

I added some side borders to try and lighten it up, but that didn’t help much.

Side borders of four-patches set on point.

At this point, I felt like maybe some puppy portraits could help.  I  purchased this Jack Russell pattern from the Featherweight Shop, and made four blocks in tan and brown.  (I didn’t get the ears to line up properly on any of them; I told myself those dogs had been in a fight and had their ears messed up.  🙂 )

Jack Russell terrier block.

With the puppy blocks as the top border, I was liking the quilt better, but when I tried to do the actual quilting, I just couldn’t get it to move through my machine!  I have a real sewing table now (another auction bargain), so the weight of the quilt was supported.  But it wouldn’t move smoothly.  I had planned a nice free-motion quilting pattern; I gave up on that and tried the walking foot in straight lines.  That didn’t work either. I tried gloves, I tried a quilting hoop that had worked for me in the past. Nothing worked.

As I sat there, ripping out the stitches that were puckering the cloth, I told my husband I was just going to cut off the borders and make a crib quilt out of it.  I told myself that I am ridiculous to try to do something on a domestic sewing machine that it is not really made for; that from now on I was only going to do small projects.  Or maybe no more projects at all! Ever!!  And then I went to bed.

By the morning, I was reminding myself that I recently completed a twin-size quilt on this same machine, so it is possible.  What variable had I changed?

I realized that when I ripped out the stitches the night before, they didn’t pull out easily.  I had to go through each one with the seam ripper.  It was like I had back-stitched the line of stitching.  I had used 50-weight cotton in top and bobbin, and it seemed like they had really meshed together.  But on the previous quilt, where I had had an easier time, I had used polyester thread.  So I switched to Glide polyester thread for the top thread, and left the cotton in the bobbin.  And now all went well, and I was able to free-motion-quilt just fine!  I just did a simple meander because I just wanted to get done.

On the puppy blocks, I echoed the shape of their heads.

Two puppies with quilting lines.

So I am not positive that it was the thread combination that did the trick, but my point is that when things don’t go well, try changing the little things.

So here is the finished quilt.  For the bottom border, I just used a panel of the blue fabric; I needed some part of this to go easily!  

 

Finished puppy quilt.

I really enjoyed the process of making the Jack Russell blocks and I think I will do more of that process in the future!

 

 

Category : Quilting
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