Okay, so your appliqué is sewn on, your pieces all sewn together and your baby blanket is starting to look like just that. What’s left? The hard parts.
Before you can sew your blanket completely, attaching the backing and batting, you should decide what and where to put any embroidery you want to put onto your project. If you have opted not to put any on, you can proceed directly to the sewing together of the batting and backing onto the front. For the rest of you, either draw out a design on paper and trace it onto the fabric, or freehand it on, or for you adventurous folk, thread your embroidery needle and start embroidering!
I like to go in two motions when embroidering. First I go left to right in one direction, then go back over it from top to bottom in another. This produces a nice effect that only improves after its first washing. On this particular blanket, I also decided to embroider a tag on the collar on the front appliqué, rather than cut and sew that small piece on.
Once the embroidery work is complete, congratulate yourself if you didn’t poke your finger with the needle. But if you did, like I usually do, it just adds to the charm of a homemade baby blanket that you literally poured your blood, sweat and tears into!
The next step is to pin the batting, backing and front for the border sewing. Make sure the front and back are facing each other, and I find putting the batting on the top keeps my sewing machine from acting up as it seems to keep stray cotton fuzzies from entering the machine and causing chaos and turmoil and crying and all around frustration. When pinning, I try to line up the pin tops with the edge of the fabric underneath, which gives me a line to follow while sewing and prevents gaps as well that may have to be fixed afterwards.
I sew all around, starting a few inches from the center of the bottom, and work my way around until I am about six inches from where I started. This leaves an easily sewn gap from which to pull out the blanket right side out… after pulling out all the pins and inspecting for gaps and making sure none of your pins accidentally got trapped in the batting. Yes, I’ve had this happen before, and no, it was not fun to rip the stitch and fish it out.
After you have the blanket right side out and pulled the corners taut, sew up the six inch gap by stitching down through the front, batting and back, tying off every few stitches or so to make a nice locking stitch. This is confusing, and I don’t know the term, but basically stitch in a way that you won’t see it. Is that called a blind stitch? I don’t know.
Once the blanket is all sewed up, the final step is to tie off. I prefer tying off to quilting because I don’t have a quilting long-arm, but if you want to quilt yours, go right ahead and do so. I start with the four corners, tying off with embroidery thread where the four fabrics meet, and double knotting the tie before cutting it down to about half an inch. Then, I tie the middle of the border where it meets the center fabric on all four sides. To figure out where to tie on the center appliqué portion, I fold the blanket into a triangle and then fold the corner tie off to the center tie off and mark where the end of the fold is, tying off that way for all four sides in the middle. The final tie I simply locate the exact center of the blanket and tie off there. If, like with this particular appliqué, the exact center is not a good place to tie off, simply find an area close to it. I found the collar was only half an inch from where I wanted to tie off, and I can live with that.
Congratulations! Now your baby blanket is complete! I usually lightly wash the blankets in borax and don’t use fabric softener before putting it into the dryer to dry on low to medium, just until it is dry. Promptly remove from the dryer, fold, and wrap or box it for the recipient!
No comments:
Post a Comment