Thursday, December 3, 2015

Eva Charm Pack Quilt

Note: This quilt and post was actually completed in the first week of October, but I was mailing to a friend with a young child. In order to not ruin the surprise, I have delayed publishing this post. I also must say, while I am slow getting to the post office, the postal service had this package delivered to Europe in only 8 days (and it was over Thanksgiving too)!


The photogenic one with the quilt

After completing my Halloween quilt, I got a new sewing machine for my birthday. My last machine was a second hand machine that I got over 10 years ago. It was an inexpensive Brother machine that just did the basics, was missing all extra attachments, and used 220 volts and I now live in the US and have to use a converter to get it to work with 110 volts. When it started skipping stitches frequently I knew it was time for a new machine!

I decided on the Brother CS6000i for my new machine. I didn't want to break the bank for a new machine, but I wanted one I could experiment a bit with. I loved that this one included most of the the extra feet and would allow me to try out some new stitches. So far it has worked very well for me and I can't complain at all. I've always had a bad habit of breaking needles, but I have yet to break one on this machine. I attribute this to the fact that the machine will stop if the needle meets too much resistance (ie too much fabric) and an error code will appear. The only thing I have to remember is the computer resets each time I turn off the machine, so I have to key in the stitch I want again. This is not a big deal at all and I've already started to get into the habitat of checking I'm on the right stitch.

Anyway to try out my new machine, I wanted to do a nice simple quilt. Since my first baby quilt was very small using only one charm pack, I wanted to make a quilt using two charm packs. The quilt shop I like to visit in Georgia had a great selection of charm packs on sale, so I thought it was perfect opportunity to try this out. I really like the colors in the Eva by Basic Grey for Moda line, so I decided to go with it.

The charm packs have 42, 5 inch squares in them. I wanted to do a square quilt though, so I only used 81 to make a 9 square by square quilt (I have 3 leftover). 

The quilt sandwich waiting to be quilted
Post quilting and removal of pins, complete with cat

The quilting was done using my new walking foot and simple straight lines. There are actually three lines near seam, but the middle one was done in the ditch style. The other two lines are measure out from this center line.

The finished quilt!

I wanted to try piecing the back fabric together this time, so I added an accent line on the backing. The binding and backing pieces are all prints from the same Eva line.

A view of the back of the quilt

1 comment:

  1. Forgot I bought this fabric and now I’m trying to make a quilt. Came across yours! Do you know how much yardage you used for the back??

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