Oh, I should begin by saying this is a real tea party, with cups and plates and goodies and dolls and a sweet little doll quilt. All manner of political hits or misses aside, please. This blog is about anything but politics. Back to the tea party and the sweet little quilt.
I discovered a quilt on Pinterest a few weeks back and loved the look. In no time I'd figured out that the block is really quite easy, so I drew out a quick pattern and figured out the square sizes. In no time I had a block completed. But I made a discovery: while the quilt is pretty, I don't want to make one. So there sat one little block--too big for AAQI and too small for much of anything except a baby doll.
This afternoon I had a moment to myself with no papers to grade...finally! So I wandered around the studio looking for something to do and spied the block. Well, why not? Make the doll quilt and toss it into the toy basket already.
Don't you know that I had fun....then I had more fun taking pictures. I carried out a favorite baby doll and a few tea party items since the outdoors makes for the best photo shoots and tea parties. Dolly and I set everything up, had tea, snapped a few pics and chatted for a while. Turns out Dolly loves the quilt so much she agreed to a nap.
I watched a video of Angela Walters' Quiltcon talk on her process for quilting and decided to apply some of the ideas I got to this little quilt. Walters suggests extending the lines of a block out into the quilt--simply draw the lines out and see what happens. I decided to test it by drawing the line from the little point that sticks out of the flower. In the picture below that line is on the left side of the picture and separates the pebbles and the swirls.
Another of Walters' suggestions is to treat each of the resulting areas with a different quilting motif.
Finally Walters' showed how she uses quilting to add movement to a quilt. While she showed quilts with swirls and lots of long lines, I didn't have the space for either, so I quilted lines with different distances between them to add variety and dimension.
By changing thread colors, I was able to quickly add in small loops on each petal. Because I added an extra layer of batting right behind the purple flower and quilted outside of the flower with tight motifs, the flower details add the look of trapunto to the quilt.
I know it seems like lots of work for a toy quilt, but it really did not take very long and I learned a few techniques along the way and had loads of fun! Don't you think the little granddaughters are going to love this doll quilt? They will be allowed to play, drag, and what ever else they can think to do with it.
Have you made a doll quilt before? What do you do with orphan blocks?
Know what you can do when you don't have to go to work? Anything. Anything at all. Anything you want to do. Anything, even if it's useless. That's what I did today. Anything useless. I made a couple of baby doll quilts. For the little granddaughters, of course, but it's not as if they asked for the quilts, and the baby dolls surely didn't ask. But what the heck....I had an idea. And, since I don't have to work, I chose to play.
Baby dolls need quilts, too, don't they? Can't have those babies getting cold. Especially since they got strollers and beds and bouncy seats for Christmas. It only makes sense that I make a couple of quilts to add to the hoard. 
It worked well, but it didn't make much of a dent in the scraps stash. In fact, I don't know that it shows at all, but I had fun with the charge, anyway. The little quilts were easy enough to make and once I made the first one, I decided to make the two other tops and quilt them together. 
I discovered a quilt on Pinterest a few weeks back and loved the look. In no time I'd figured out that the block is really quite easy, so I drew out a quick pattern and figured out the square sizes. In no time I had a block completed. But I made a discovery: while the quilt is pretty, I don't want to make one. So there sat one little block--too big for AAQI and too small for much of anything except a baby doll.
This afternoon I had a moment to myself with no papers to grade...finally! So I wandered around the studio looking for something to do and spied the block. Well, why not? Make the doll quilt and toss it into the toy basket already.
