seester baby doll quilts

just before christmas my seester*, loree, stopped by and asked if i could help her make some dolls quilts for a doll bunk bed santa would be bringing her 3 year old daugther. 

loree's called me before just before christmas wanting to know if i could make a stocking like the ones my mom made for everyone and i had to tell her no. the stockings would have taken me forever to figure out and i wasn't confident in my ability to make one.

but a doll quilt (or two) i could do.

we talked about possible fabrics and patterns. loree, like most members of my family, has really big ideas, and as she has no experience quilting, i had to keep reigning her in on what was feasible for me to pull off before the deadline.

she thought everything was cute and kept flitting around. "we just need a pattern. where is the book of patterns?," she said. i laughed out loud because there are a gazillion quilt patterns in the world, not just a single book of patterns.

and this was a doll quilt. for a very active little girls who's probably going to love and use them to pieces. we settled on a simple strips quilt using 2.5" strips and made plans for which day to assemble them.

she came over a few days before christmas and we got to work. 

first, was fabric selection. i'd been thinking about the fabrics loree was drawn to, which were mostly light colored. i suggested we do something that would withstand the love they're going to get a little better, but she kept coming back to the low volume prints and i just gave in so we could get started.

at one point she started looking at my shelf of liberty tana lawn prints. "these are pretty!" oh, yes, they are. i was feeling very generous about the project but that's where i drew the line. "yes, those are really nice. they're my best fabrics. but everything on that shelf comes from london and costs $35/yard. i'm sorry but we're not using them for this doll quilt." she laughed out loud and totally understood.

we finally settled on fabric strips, mostly leftovers from my "collins" quilt, with a few butterflies thrown in because her daughter loves butterflies and they have a connection to our mom, an accomplished seamstress who passed away in 2018. we chose this ruby star society butterfly print (i think from "stay gold" by melody miller?) as a sort of feature fabric to use 3 times and give the quilt a little bit of cohesion. (that's the backing print in the upper right corner.)

then i set her to work on one machine on one quilt and i did the other one on my second machine and pressed for both of us. like most first-timers, she was laughing about her accuracy and the unexpected difficulty of sewing a simple straight line. but she did just fine. i had her sew on the turtle (slow speed) and it worked well.

she heard me ripping away on the hare (high speed) and said, "that's the sound i remember coming from mom's machine." i assured her it took me 10 years to work up to sewing on the hare and she was doing great.

"why are you so much faster than me?," she asked. i wasn't that much faster. since i was also pressing both our strips, we ended up finishing up about the same time.

she had to go at that point, so i finished them off myself. 

 before she left, she picked a backing, but not a binding. when i completed the simple straightline quilting, i decided on this cute amy sinibaldi polka dot print for the binding. for durability, i chose to machine attach the binding. i do despise machine binding! it went much better on the second one. i was cursing through most of it, wishing i could just handbind. but timing was of the essence and they need to survive a lot of rough play. 

i had both dolly quilts completed by evening.

they got delivered in time for christmas morning and later that day i had the great pleasure of seeing my niece lovingly playing with her dolls, tucking them into their beds under the quilts over and over. she was at it most of the day.

that was sweet, but spending hours quilting with my seester was the best gift of all.

*all five us of sisters have double "e" names - hydee, loree, marcee, jodee, katee - which is why we call each other "seester."