October 25, 2017
Jinja
0

Charm Shuffle

I have a coworker whose wife is pregnant and due the beginning of November. They’ve decided to not find out what sex the baby is, so I tasked myself with making a gender-neutral baby quilt for them. The pattern is called Charm Shuffle, and it’s from the book Big Blocks Big Style – I picked it up at my local quilt shop, but you can get it on Amazon. I made it in the Lap size, which calls for 78 charm squares. It’s a little big for a baby quilt. I could probably have gotten away with just four blocks and with sashing and borders it would make an acceptable size of baby quilt.

Fabrics

I used two charm packs from the Missouri Star Quilt Company that I spent ages looking for ones that 1) went together, 2) were cute enough for a baby, 3) had both blue and pink/purple for both genders. Found a very cute pack with woodland creatures and narwhals. The white sashing is from the stash. It’s a white on white polka dot that I had significant yardage of for some reason (no idea why). The large brown border is from the local quilt shop, and the backing is from Joann’s! Their premium line is really looking good lately.

The backing

Quilting

I damn near killed myself last week trying to get this done in time for the baby shower at work. Sadly I failed to do so. I was SO CLOSE! I just had half the binding to sew to the back, and then wash it to be done. So I had to finish it up last weekend. Maybe I would have made it if I hadn’t quilted it quite so densely. the sashing and inner borders are all quilted 1/2″ apart. It’s lovely and dense, but man it was a LOT of quilting. I left the blocks themselves relatively un-quilted because I wanted them to pop from the dense quilting around them, and also I didn’t want to sew all over the animal’s cute faces. Plus the dense quilting lost some of it’s softness. So the blocks are stitched in the ditch around the different tiers of charms. By the time I got to the large border I was over doing the 1/2″ dense lines, so I quilted a line diagonally from the corner of the inner border to the outer corner, so it has a slight mitered look. Then I quilted down the center of the border, and then down the center of each half, which I think makes them 1.5″ apart.

The morning sun shows off the quilting well.

Blocks

The quilt is made up of six 17.5″ (unfinished) blocks that take 13 charm squares each. Because some of my fabric was directional and had cute animals on it, I took particular care to have them all going the same way and to frame them as much as I could. Obviously I couldn’t fussy cut them since I bought precuts, but I did pick out all the best ones to put in the centers, and then if some were more towards one side I would put them in a spot where I wouldn’t cut a narwhal’s head off. Of course this did mean that I had to cut each block individually and sew them one at a time. I did mess up on the first block, so some fabrics are going the wrong way (it’s the middle left one).

Tips, Tricks, & Pitfalls

There were two things that combined in this project that created a source of much saltiness for me. And if either of them were not true, then it wouldn’t have been a problem, but they were both true and so blame lies with both. The first is that this pattern has NO margin of error when cutting the charm squares. It assumes you will definitely have a perfect 5″ charm square. The second is that you should never trust precuts because they are never accurate. The precut charms I got were pinked on the edges. The very tips of the little spikes might reach a full 5″ on a good one. So it’s partly the fault of the precuts, because they are never accurate. I don’t know why I bothered working with them again after what happened with Come Fly With Me. And then it’s partly the fault of this pattern for not building any margin of error into cutting of 5″ charm squares. That said, the quilt went together amazingly well. There weren’t a lot of pieces that ended up too long, and despite what the blocks look like, there’s only 4 seams you have to match in the final steps of block assembly.

Total time spent: 3 weeks!