My forays into quilting and other crafts



Page last updated 08/28/05

Mostly September and a few days in October 2004
"Rubber Ducky" lap quilt for Charlotte

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Charlotte woke up one night this summer from a dream, screaming for her yellow ducky quilt. The problem: she didn't have one. She was inconsolable for half an hour or so but eventually went back to sleep (with a lot of help from Mama). Several times after that, she asked for her ducky quilt or her ducky blanket. We didn't have any such thing that I knew of.

A nice woman on Freecycle gave me some duck fabric, and Charlotte loved the fabric, but the print was very sedate and realistic and - other than some plain yellow fabric and some very sedate, old-ladyish small prints - I had nothing to coordinate with it. Most of my fabrics are somewhat saturated if not very bright, and Charlotte likes light/bright colors. I wanted something more kiddie...

I remembered seeing some "Bathtub Ducky" fabric at the Hancock store in Sterling a year or two ago, and thought I'd look for some locally. The local G Street store found a yard or two with a royal blue background, but she's not much into blue. I found someone online who was selling precut 4" squares of rubber ducky fabric with pink and turquoise backgrounds. Each packet came with an equal number of squares of yelow and white gingham. I bought a packet of each.

Since I'd finally finished Mimi's "Around the World" quilt for Miranda and didn't have any other pressing craft projects, it was time to get started. I laid the pink and turquoise duck squares and the yellow gingham squares out on our bed and started rearranging. Tried to decide between diagonal stripes of gingham alternating with stripes of mostly pink duck fabric, with a few random turquoise duck squares thrown in. It wasn't bad, but I wasn't sure I wanted to sew it up that quickly. Tried it as a sort of Around the World arrangement; that too wasn't bad but I wasn't sure if I wanted to do that. I was pretty divided between the two for a while. Shawn thought there was "too much yellow". We both thought it was kind of blinding with that much unmatched yellow gingham, especially in the "Around the World" layout. I tried bringing in a few other fabrics with colors that would work, but the patterns didn't work - flowers made no sense with the ducks; neither did stars. I tried some plain yellow squares of various shades; still too much yellow. Miranda pointed out that I had a piece of yellow fabric with white polka-dots that would be perfect for the backing. It was just the right size. Miranda gave some other good suggestions, but no matter how we rearranged it there was always too much gingham near the ducks and it was very distracting - we just didn't have enough duck squares for anything but a very small quilt. We needed at least a third or fourth fabric. I spent a lot of time trying to arrange the various duck squares so that very similar ones wouldn't end up next to or in line with each other. A thankless task. I eventually (after Mom came over) rearranged them so they were approximately as they'd been in the raw fabric. That was a lot easier and ended up looking fine.

I got my mom to come over and check out what we were trying. Mom said there were just too many fabrics mixed in (by now I was trying some florals in the corners and the gingham and some yellow in addition to the two duck fabrics). She suggested some white. The only white-on-white I had enough of was the same bubble/firework fabric I'd used in Miranda's big and little quilts and also in the firemen's wall quilt. It actually worked with the duck fabric very well. I cut out a whole bunch of white-on-white bubble squares and started substituting them for some of the ginghams near the middle. Shawn said there was still too much gingham - that it distracted from the ducks.

I eventually replaced all of the gingham with the white bubbles, but then the quilt wasn't all that big and I didn't know what to do with the gingham, which I liked. Miranda had the brilliant idea to use the gingham and plain yellow squares, simply alternating, as the border. I'd tried some similar borders, but there were always a couple of extra fabrics mixed in.

Very happy, I went with her idea and I sewed the squares into strips and then into sections within a day or two. Sewed the three big sections together; Charlotte tried to abscond with "her quilt" at this point, insisting it was done. You could see her getting more and more excited as the squares of fabric started looking like something usable.

Added batting and backing; started sewing. Something was wrong - the back was off to one side, even though I was sure I'd laid it out and pinned it carefully. Had to remove two or three sides of stitching, recut the backing, and resew it all back together. I stitched in the ditch around the inner edge of the border and around the outside edges of the pink duck squares, plus the white squares nearest the corners. I messed up early on and stitched the borders too close to the outermost edge in a couple of places, but otherwise it came out OK.

It looks awfully wrinkled in the photos... Charlotte rolled it around herself when she finally got posession of it.

Charlotte with her ducky quilt Charlotte's ducky quilt, front
Charlotte's ducky quilt, closeup of front

It's very cute and sweet, which was the main goal, but I did it so quickly that I feel like it's incomplete. Then again, I'm not sure how much more quilting I'd do - or where. It ended up being a very lightweight quilt, less floppy than I'd expected. Fine for a light summer covering, but I'll need to make her a warmer one for winter.

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