July/August 2012 - Hungry Caterpillar quilt

Several of my friends are expecting babies at the moment, but back in February I only knew about one of them. I happened to be in the crafty shop when I saw some Hungry Caterpillar fabric.
(It's made by Andover Fabrics, they have a couple of free patterns featuring the hungry caterpillar fabrics on their site also)
I'm a big fan of the hungry caterpillar, so obviously, I wanted an excuse to buy this fabric and make something out of it, so I decided to make a quilt for the new baby.
So I bought the fabric and kept it in my fabric box for a few months as I got distracted with other things. Finally in July I dug it out, measured it and went to buy backing fabric and wadding so that I could actually make it into something.
As it's one printed piece rather than a patchwork quilt, it's not as big as a bed quilt (it's about 70cm x 120cm) but it's still bigger than anything I've done before, so I consulted the internet for useful information and found some tutorials at Ludlow Quilt & Sew which I found quite useful (I just happened to find them through google, I know nothing about them other than their website.)
I decided to not be too complicated, and just outline the main motifs & white panels, and sew around the edge.
First of all I made up a practice piece to make sure I could follow the lines and quilt without making too much of a mess of the back, so I made up a little square about 25cm x 25cm of fabric and wadding that I had from other projects, and tried to quilt around all the flowers.
It didn't turn out too bad, the worst bit was where I tried to quilt all in one line so that I wouldn't have too many ends, which made the back look quite odd (I was using a contrasting thread so that I could tell what I was doing). This wouldn't be a problem in the actual quilt as it would mainly be straight lines & obviously I could just start & stop more often.

Patterned side of practice piece

Backing side of practice piece

So I'd already washed and ironed the fabric for the main quilt, so I pinned the layers together & basted it (sewing it roughly together by hand so that the layers stay mainly in the right place), and I was ready to start.
Here it is after I'd quilted the butterfly:

Front of quilt at the beginning - the wadding
and backing is oversized so I don't have to
trim the front too much when it's finished

Back of quilt at the beginning -
you can see the lines of quilting better from the back

Close-up of quilting lines and basting

So I carried on quilting the outlines. I had to sew in all the ends as well so it took a few weeks working in the evenings (though it probably would have been quicker if I hadn't decided to quilt around each segment of the caterpillar!)

Panel of leaf & tiny caterpillar

Beautiful butterfly!

The Very Hungry Caterpillar has not yet eaten any holes in the quilt!

Back of almost-finished quilt showing quilt lines

The last part was the leaf, and I happened to be quilting it on the evening the Olympics started, and I wanted to watch the opening ceremony at the same time as sewing so I moved my sewing machine in front of the TV (the table it sits on has wheels as it's actually a computer desk). This is the advantage of not having an electric sewing machine, I don't need to be next to the wall socket the whole time.

I managed to finish the outline of the leaf reasonably quickly with the olympics to help me, so I somewhat foolishly decided to do some more quilting on the dotty background. I quilted diagonal lines about an inch apart across all the background, which took longer than you might think. (My sewing machine has a foot with a guide so that I can sew parallel lines so at least I didn't need to draw lines across my fabric). Originally I was going to do the diagonals both ways but as it looked fine with just one way diagonals, I decided to stop.

Once I'd trimmed the excess wadding and neatened the edges,the final step was to attach the binding. Again I consulted the useful tutorials from Ludlow Quilt & Sew and I managed to have enough of my backing material left over to make binding for all around the quilt. (Next time I must remember to allow for that when I buy the fabric!)



Here are some close ups of the binding on the finished quilt:

Binding on front of quilt

Binding on back of quilt showing slipstitches

Despite using white cotton for the top thread of the quilting, I managed to use nearly a whole reel of green cotton!

I only have a little bit of cotton left!

Final finished quilt of beauty

And here's a video of Eric Carle reading the book for you!