Jeana’s Journal

 

 I promised a few weeks ago to show you pictures of the doll quilts I made for our daughter’s children. The three older girls have American Girls dolls. For Christmas they received a bunk bed with a trundle underneath for their dolls to sleep in. At my daughter’s suggestion I made quilts for each of their beds.

The colors for each doll quilt were chosen to match the bed-sized quilts each girl sleeps under every night—which also portrays their personalities.

 

 I started first with this Economy Block quilt. The tiny squares are each finished one and one-half inches square.

When my husband saw me laboring over the tiny quarter-square pieces. He kindly suggested that larger pieces would go together faster. I reminded him, however, that this quilt was for a doll and that scale made a difference.

 

  The top went together fairly fast, but the machine quilting on my trusty little featherweight Singer was difficult. It kept skipping stitches on the thick intersections. So for the remaining quilts I purposefully planned designs that did not have such thick intersections.

 

 Quilt number two was a Log Cabin. This quilt went together very well and quickly. Each Log Cabin block is 3″ square with each log measuring one-half inch when finished.

 

 Accuracy, as you know, is always a problem with log cabin quilt blocks, but I squared up each block with each log addition and that kept the squares accurate.

I finished three outside edges of the doll quilts with rick rack. The rick rack allowed me to avoid hand sewing a binding onto the quilt and it’s placement indicates the top and bottom of the quilt for easy reference when “tucking in” the dolls for the night.

Next I made the Steeple Chase quilt for our oldest grandaughter. Again, the quarter sections of the main quilt block were one and one-half inches square, with the completed block a 3″ square. Since it was late Thursday night and I had classes in the City for the next two days, I prepared the blocks to hand applique the curved smaller piece onto a 1-½” square instead of trying to machine piece those tiny curved seams. That way I could work on the blocks when I was away.

 

 It worked like a charm. After the small corner piece was appliqued onto the larger square, I trimmed the excess larger square fabric away from behind the small curved piece. It was a fun quilt to make and I was sorry when I had to move onto the next quilt.

 

 In my hurry to wrap these gifts last Monday I neglected to take a full quilt picture of my grandson’s quilt. His quilt is much larger than the girls’ quilts. It is a 34″ square. The Four Patch Unit (including the corner pieces that square it up) is 4″ square. The sashing between the blocks is 1″ wide.

 

 I intentionally planned to make a larger quilt for his toy dinosaur, but it grew bigger and bigger as I put it together. In the end, he is happy with his quilt anyway.

 

 Then, finally, for our littlest granddaughter, I made a dress for her new Bitty Baby doll that Santa brought her for Christmas. Since the doll came with her own quilt, a change of clothes seemed like a good idea.

 

 Whew! And I thought I was through making doll accessories when our daughter became a teenager!