A Quilt for Ty

This is a dream come true. I have made a quilt!

Actually, we have made a quilt. This was definitely a joint venture and I can't imagine doing it without Todd! I was clueless in the beginning. I didn't fully understand the pattern I found, was hopeless at making conversions (remember, we're on the metric system here and the pattern was in the imperial system), and didn't know the first thing about using a sewing machine.

Thankfully, Todd could fill in my gaps (a.k.a., giant gaping holes) and we had such a good time doing this project together! We picked out our fabric, Todd did the calculating and cutting, we both ironed and sewed and in the end could really say that we had done it :)

My favorite part of the actual sewing process was hand-stitching the binding onto the backing of the quilt. It only took me about 6 hours (not all at once) from start to finish. I also really liked learning how to use a sewing machine, and while those things are fantastic for actually getting things done, using one isn't the relaxing part of the process that hand-stitching is.

When I showed Todd the tutorial for the confetti quilt I'd found on Pinterest (which you can view here at Bijou Lovely) that I wanted to make for Ty, I asked him to pick out what colors he would like. He went with a nautical color scheme and I was happy about that :) While Ty is a boy, I didn't want to do something overly boyish or babyish for his quilt. I love the beach so nautical is perfect!

Here are the patterns we chose for the 56 circles, 7 of each pattern:

This one is the wave piece...it was pretty much perfect :)

This one made me think of the bottom of a shallow creek bed. Can you imagine you're looking at cool water dancing over brown and copper pebbles?

Here's some green-blue water, kind of like what you'd see if you visited the gulf.

And here's our deep sea representative.

This one looks more like the surface of a pool,  so blue and refreshing! Maybe there's an ocean somewhere that looks like this...

And this is obviously sand :) I liked the shimmery gold specks.

Technically, this is also a "sand" piece, but we mostly chose it for the pattern.

Here's the whole gang, complimenting each other beautifully:

We were off a little in our dimensions, so our quilt turned out a bit smaller than the one in the tutorial we followed. But we're still quite pleased :)

Oh, and here're some samples from the backing fabric:

While the overall product did turn out well, it is certainly handmade by beginner quilters. I made more than a few blunders with the sewing machine, and there's a place in my binding stitching that leaves a lot to be desired. I guess that just adds to the homemade-ness of it.

This was such a fun, rewarding project, and I'd definitely be up for making more...so long as Todd would be up for another joint venture :) I'm not quite ready to tackle it single-handedly.