Milas’ Quilt aka the #murphyquilt

This baby quilt is for Milas the baby boy of a friend. I already made a quilt for her firstborn daughter Felia and immediately decided I wanted to sew another quilt when I heard the good news.

We picked this layout idea. That picture is the reason for the strange working title I used in the beginning: speedsign quilt. The color inspiration came from this.

Unfortunately the working title changed quickly to #murphyquilt. I think everything that could go wrong did and I was constantly fixing “problems” and hoping with all my heart that it would turn out fine in the end. Which it did :)

Here is the list of “problems” – broke up by some more nice pictures. I don’t want to grumble but show you that we all struggle at some or sometimes more points in the journey.

(1) When planning the block layout on a makeshift design wall during our monthly patchwork meeting I miscounted. The quilt grid is now 7.5 by 8 blocks instead of really beeing square. Ok, you don’t really see that when not counting or measuring ;)

(2) During basting I realized that I misscut all the pieces to the finished size. Yeah, easily fixable, add a wide outer border.

(3) Then the requested batting didn’t work out at all. Just buy new batting and rebaste the quilt.

(5) The newly acquired batting was really fuzzy. The whole quilt top and quilt back were covered in lint before I was even half way through the quilting. I fixed this with cutting the backing and batting down to the quilt top size and pinning a folded strip around the whole quilt to stop it from shedding more fluff. Don’t you enjoy an extra step?

(6) Then the backing started to pucker, a lot! I unstitched three or four quilt lines and rebasted that part, again.

(7) With all that rebasting the backing fabric shifted too much, so I had to cut down the outer border strip to roughly half its size to have the whole quilt covered with backing. It might be smaller than planned but it is not the size that matters with gifts, right?

(8) Then I decided to cut the binding a bit bigger at 2.5 because of the slightly higher loft of the batting. I would not have needed this and I was definitely not skilled enough to handle the extra amount of binding. The binding is secure but its not good looking. You might be able to see this a bit in the above picture. Though I really love the look of the stars in the binding. :)

Is any of this really important in the end? Not to me. Though it might be a bit funny when you tell the story so exaggerated. Everything is true but isn’t it normal for most quilters to change designs or fix “mistakes” in between?

And the most important thing is that Milas now has his own baby quilt to rest and play upon, to cuddle and find warmth and shelter.

Linking up at
Let’s Bee Social #151 @ Sew Fresh Quilts

This is my second finish from my Q4 FAL list so I will link up there later.