1st Bed Quilt

With my new sewing machine, my husband suggested that I make a quilt for the bed in our travel trailer. I suggested that I get a National Parks panel. There is a fabric designer, Riley Blake that had an entire National Parks themed fabric line.

He liked that idea but insisted we had to have Canyonlands National Park as part of the quilt. That specific park isn’t one that was made as its own panel, but I was able to find it as part of “The Grand Circle”.

I purchased the panel from a seller on Etsy and then got to work figuring out the colors and design to use. Flying geese was the winning quilting design. I found solid fabrics that matched the panels they would be next to. As I made the flying geese, there were extras left over that were used as a 2nd border. Hooray, no waste (or at least less waste)!

I had fun choosing which border color fabric to use. I took the quilt top that I had done to that point and other fabric that I had used in the trailer redo a couple years ago to the quilt store and laid it out to see what colors would work best.

As it goes with quilting, there were a few things that came up a bit short (sometimes my math was a little off) so I added a bit more fabric to it to make it work.

There was an issue along the way. For some reason, the navy blue fabric melted when ironed even though it had been ironed at least 5 times previously. That fabric was reusing an old pillowcase, so I think the fiber content wasn’t as much cotton as I thought. Oops!! Thankfully, the iron was easily cleaned up.

It was really fun to see the quilt develop as more borders were sewn on. I knew what I wanted it to look like but actually seeing it in the end was even better (and a LOT bigger) than I had imagined.

To finish the quilt, I was able to visit a friend who has a long-arm quilting machine. It was so nice of her to let me invade her and her family for a couple of days, and it was so much fun to get to spend time with her! (Thank you Emily!!!!)

She showed me how to get the quilt attached to the machine and then how to run the machine over the quilt to get all the stitches in. I asked if I could do it, and I ended up doing the majority of the stitching on the quilt. It’s a learning curve, but so fun once you get in the groove.

We got it finished up in 1 day. I headed home the next morning and then was able to finish the binding once I got home.

I really love how it turned out. It’s a little bit too big for the RV bed, but that’s okay, that just means there’s more to wrap up in on cold nights.

I believe this will be the first of many quilts to come!