Thursday, December 4, 2008

New Life to Timmy's blanket

We've loved this quilt for over three and a half years now.  It's Timmy's "blankie" and the backside really started falling apart.  This first picture shows the blanket in March 2005, beforeTimothy ever laid eyes on it.  It was an awesome baby shower gift made by my sister Jen. After many months and many blankets, he chose this as his favorite.  I'm not sure why the backing fabric fell apart, but it was in very poor condition. I tried fixing the tears earlier this year, but the holes just kept coming.  

So, we picked out new fabric together.  I wanted to stick with a batik to keep with the original quilt. Surprisingly, Tim took this all very well and didn't mind too much about the new fabric or not having his blankie for two weeks.  The new batik is very different, but it does have dots like he wanted.  I separated the quilt and sandwiched it together with new cotton batting and the new fabric.  Rather than tying it, I felt like hand quilting. It took a little while, but I think it was worth it.  I created a double-fold binding with pieces from the back and barely had enough.  I finished hand stitching the binding last night and Tim had his blankie once again.  I was prepared for him to shun this new rendition (he'd already commented on how it seemed really different).  I put the blanket on him while he slept and he trooped downstairs this morning enjoying it lots.  I'm really happy it turned out well.  

And here is the blanket November 2008:
On the back, if you look closely, you can see where I stitched up a long vertical tear near the top.

Here is the new quilt back, after quilting.  

The quilted top. If you look closely you can see the stitches.  My quilting is rather uneven, but I don't hold myself to a very high standard with this sort of thing.  To save time, I just quilted every other square.  I'm really not sure if that is acceptable, but it seems to work okay.
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2 comments:

Jennifer Hannan said...

Looks great!! Probably better than the first time!! Good job!!

Laura Hennessee said...

Nothing beats the original! Thanks for making him such a great quilt, Jen!