Bloggers’ Quilt Festival – Yellow Bear Quilt

My entry into the Bloggers Quilt Festival would certainly not qualify as the most beautiful or most intricately pieced or the most original.  Its design is a simple one; flannel blocks from a bear print that I fussy cut alternating with a coordinating yellow flannel.

Those blocks are framed with a single border cut from that same yellow flannel with a fussy cut rocking horse in each corner.

I used a coordinating yellow plaid flannel for the binding.  You can’t get much simpler than that.

What makes this quilt special, to me at least, is that it’s the second quilt I’d ever made; there being a twenty plus year gap between it and the first.   Also, this is the first baby quilt I’ve ever made.  Can you imagine… I have three adult children and even though I sewed a lot of their clothes when they were little, I never made them a quilt.

This quilt was made for Dave’s second grandchild.  I started it a few months before she was born, but she didn’t receive it until her second birthday.   Oh… I got the top finished before she was born, but then I got stuck because I wasn’t sure how to finish it.   It took almost two more years of reading quilt blogs and seeing how other people did things before I decided that ready or not, that quilt needed to be finished so that said grandchild could use it before she outgrew it.

There were so many things I learned over the process of making this quilt, starting with some basic quilting terms.  At the time I was cutting out the blocks for the top, I didn’t even know the term “fussy cut.”  I just knew I wanted a bear in the middle of each block and cut them out that way.  It wasn’t until later that I learned that fussy cutting was the term used to describe cutting out blocks to feature a certain print.

I learned about ¼” seams.  But it wasn’t until later that I figured out that a ¼” seam isn’t really a ¼” seam, it’s an almost ¼” seam.

I learned how to piece a backing.

I learned how to sew on a binding using a tutorial by Sharon Schamber.

I learned that I hate pin basting; which is one of the reasons why up until a month ago this quilt was only the second I’d ever completed.  Now that I’ve discovered hand-basting (again through another Sharon Schamber video tutorial) I’m hoping to get this top and this top turned into finished quilts.

Oh… and one more thing I learned is that quilts can be incredibly difficult to photograph.

But finally and perhaps most importantly, I learned that the quilting and crafting community contains some of the most interesting, generous and fun-loving people I’ve ever encountered.

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