Getting Back On The Horse

It has seriously been almost 2 years since I've sewn anything!  No joke!  I moved my craft room from downstairs to upstairs about a year and a half ago, and the sewing stuff got packed in the closet for safe keeping as there wasn't enough room in my new "Craft Cave" to accommodate all the scrapbooking stuff PLUS all the sewing stuff.  I got rid of my stash of fabric and tucked away my machines.  That is, until today.

My serger... all ready to get to work

After the expo yesterday, I'm so excited about starting on these cuddle blankets!  It feels good to pull out my machines, dust them off, and get them back up and running.  First thing was to serge all the edges of my flannel cuts so that I can get them all washed.  That was a chore in itself.  I forgot how to thread my machine :-(  After about an hour of fiddling, I finally got it and it was off to the races to get all the cuts done.

After a good washing and dying, the fabric was ironed and ready to be cut.  Fortunately, the blanket is small and the pattern very self-explanatory and the cutting was easy peasy.  I decided to do the boy version first as it was being done in Hubby's favorite... Superman!  About four hours later, I had this...

Sorry about the cruddy picture... it's late here and dark out and the lighting in my craft cave isn't the greatest for photos :-(

It came out so stinkin cute!  It's about 21" x 21" square and I did a 2 1/2" binding on it and did it on my sewing machine.  Boy I won't do that again!  The back came out terrible!  There are a whole bunch of spots where the machine didn't catch the binding on the back and I had to go back and hand-sew it anyways.  Plus there are a couple of spots where the back of the binding slipped and it's not even.  Next time I'm going to just hand-bind it and see how that goes.

The blanket itself was very minimally quilted.  I "stitched in the ditch" down the main seams in both directions.   I've yet to try machine quilting yet and I didn't want to mess this up trying, so I did what I knew.  Hopefully down the road I'll be able to try my hand at actually machine quilting it.  We'll see.

Now it's off to cut the pieces for the girl version :-)