Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Incubator Quilt

My mum's guild make incubator quilts for the local hospital. It always seems like a lot of fun and since I have steadily been collecting offcuts, I thought I would give it a go, making sure it was all stuff from my stash. So here's what I did.



I cut an offcut of wadding 18.5" x 22.5". I had to sew multiple bits together with a zig zag stitch.



You sift through your stash for some colours that go together, then you cut your material into strips. They can be any width, but if they're too big they might look odd. I was told to make them between 1" & 3". I ended up making mine mostly 1.5", with a few 2" strips and one set of 3.5" squares just to jazz it up a bit. You lay the strips over the wadding so they overlap the edges and you sew each one to the next. I lined them back up on the wadding each time so I could check where they needed to be sewn. I had a lot of very small offcuts so I had to sew lots of strips in the middle to make them long enough.



You iron your finished shape then lay your wadding on top and cut round it.



It's really quick! I got this far in a few hours. Now here comes the tricky bit. I need to find a bit of backing big enough. It might have to be pieced together out of more offcuts. I'll have to do a search tomorrow. Things could get messy.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's cool. How do you make your fabric sit so flat and still and lined up so you can cut it so accurately and straight? Looks like you have quite a sophisticated cutter there too.

Anonymous said...

Hey Annie
I iron it until it's at fat a possible then I cut it using a rotary cutter and big ruler. It gives really straight edges. Sometimes I cut material slightly too big so that I have a bit of extra to trim off to make sure all my edges are sharp. I don't know what I'd do without a rotary cutter!