My grandma Janet recently started chemo. Since she is in southern California and I am not I wanted to do something special for her in lieu of being able to visit.

I’ve heard (okay, I’ve seen on TV) that it’s usually freezing in the hospital during chemo treatments. I’m not sure if this is true, but I decided to try making a quilt. I wasn’t entirely sure it would come out well enough to give as a gift but dug in anyway.

I followed a very similar color palate as the one from the tutorial I used. I was going for “cheerful” and these colors seemed perfect. I loved that orange fabric with the leaves but ended up cutting it the wrong size twice, and only had enough to use it twice.

Action shots. The ratio of sewing to ironing is pretty much 1:1 in quilt making. I think I should probably upgrade to an actual ironing board for my back’s sake.

I was super proud of finishing the top. I don’t know what happened with the red, but the seams on the other four colors actually line up much better than I was expecting.

I worked on the project for three weeks, usually just an hour or two at a time. Quilting projects are made up of a million steps. It might seem daunting, but I actually like that there are so many steps to break up the work into. It makes it much easier for me to work on it for an hour after work versus clearing a whole weekend to complete one from start to finish. 

I love the back. It’s really simple and definitely far from perfect, but I think the colorful striped thread is so cheerful.

This was the second project I tackled from the Get Quilty eCourse, so again I’m not posting any of the specific steps. It was very easy to follow and I made a few improvements over my winter table runner. I learned how to use a seam ripper to rip only the seams, not fabric. I also didn’t have to stop every five minutes to fix something with the sewing machine. That was huge. I am guessing that is just coming from practice.

Project: 4/35
Time: 12 hours (?)
Tutorial: Get Quilty eCourse
Cost: $72.17 ($65.77 fabric, batting, thread; $6.40 1/5 eCourse cost)

This sounds quite expensive, but it’s mostly ‘start-up’ costs: I had to buy three more colors of thread ($10), to get all the different patterns I bought 1/4 yard of 19 fabrics and probably used just over half of each, I started with a gray fabric for the binding but ended up going with creams so that went unused, I got lazy at the last minute and bought the final backing and binding fabrics from a local shop without sales or coupons. My guess is once I collect thread in most colors and build up a collection of scrap fabric, a quilt will cost between $30 and $40.