I wanted to give sweet baby Amelia a "Katie Quilt" for her birthday. I used everything from my stash. I started with this large piece of minkee fleece that I had leftover from another project. It's super soft and BIG so I didnt' have to piece fabric together for the backing. I have used Minkee for backing before, but I always used batting ALSO, but this time I left out the batting. For a large, bed-size quilt I think batting is fine, but I wanted something that she could lug around herself, so it needed to be LIGHT too.
Double Sided Minkee is thick enough that it doesn't require batting. Also, it gives a very nice effect when free-motion quilted. However there is a slight downside when you omit the batting. When there is no batting, there is nothing for the fleece to stick to. The batting acts as a stabilizer so that your fleece doesn't shift around. To remedy that problem I just used lots of safety pins in the basting process.
For the quilt TOP I pieced together feminine prints of pink and grey. Honestly, I'm not real sure what I was going for here - just scrappy I guess!! Who knows, it was late when I came up with this design ;c) I think a quilt looks best when you incorporate elements from the back on the front, and vice versa. So for the front, I appliqued circles of minkee and also used the minkee as the binding.
** I have a tutorial on how to do self-binding with fleece HERE**
In this last picture you can get a good look at the quilting design I used. I always want to try these fun large-scale quilting motifs, but am always too scared. I love the look of all-over free-hand feathers, but every time I attempt them I regret it. I think maybe it's because I think every tiny bit of space needs to be quilted - and everything needs to be touching.
So for my last couple projects I have been trying to use more negative space. I think just as rainbow colors only look good with a good amount of WHITE. . . . "fancy" quilting only look good when there is some negative space? Maybe? I'm working on it anyway!
