Some favorite things from 2012: Hand quilting

Since I was awful at keeping a blog last year I thought I'd do a few entries that highlight some of my favorite things I did. 

One of my favorite things that I did last year was learn how to hand quilt and I love it.  I've wanted to try it for a while now because my mother-in-law does a lot of handquilting and it is beautiful.  It also interested me because I love to do handwork.  Some people do and some people don't and that's ok, but I do. 

So, one of my other goals for 2012 was to make gifts for people's birthdays and when John's mom's birthday came up I decided to make her a quilt.  When I finished it, I decided to try hand quilting it because it turned out too cool to tie, and I hate machine quilting. And I had a lot of fun doing it.  It was hard at first, but once I got the hang of it, and a few good callouses, I loved it.  So here's what the quilt looked like when I was finished.

Unfortunately you can't really see the quilting, but I just did basic outline quilting.  I based the pattern on an actual Scrabble board, and the names are all the names of the grandkids (when I made the quilt).  I also embroidered the letter tiles using a satin stitch.  It was really fun to make and was one of those things where it actually turned out as cool as you envision it in your head.

That gave me a taste for quilting and then I was off.  I finished a t-shirt quilt that I've had pieced for John for about a year, but now I could finally finish it because I could handquilt it (It was too big to machine quilt). I did mostly outline quilting in this one too, but tried a few more adventurous shapes.  It was really fun.  These are lots of John's t-shirts from high school, his first year at BYU, and his mission.  It was fun to put together and now he can actually use it. I gave it to him officially for Christmas.

And lastly, I quilted a quilt for my sister-in-law that my mom pieced together.  Since it was just squares, I used quilting tape to quilt half square triangeles within the squares.  It was really simple but it turned out great.  The quilting masking tape is another thing I learned about from my mother-in-law. 

I also learned how to do binding which turned out really well.  Here is how it looked on the last quilt:

Learning how to do these things was one of my favorite parts of last year.  They're definitely things I will continue to do and experiement  with.  Yay for hand quilting!!