Dear community,
in this blog post you can find easy instructions for sewing a lovely doll’s quilt.
This year the BERNINA Advent Calendar takes as its theme “Everything a child could wish for!”
Today we are opening the fifteenth door and there are only nine more sleeps till Christmas Eve. Here on the blog we have already seen a lively variety of ideas for children, and today it’s my turn to provide you with inspiration. Naturally I mulled it over carefully and thought back to my own childhood. I used to love playing with my baby doll and rocked her to sleep in her cosy doll’s cradle.
So today I’m going to show you how to make a doll’s quilt!
The miniature quilt is just 14″ square and consists of four blocks.
What you need
- Two different fabrics (“Garland” for the star, “Raindrop” for the background, both Cotton&Steel)
- Matching sewing thread
- Patchwork foot No. 37
- Walking foot No. 50
- Quilting thread
- Volume fleece
Fabric quantities
- For the star and the back: 45 cm
- For the background and the binding: 30 cm
Pattern
- 4 pieces 4 x 4″ for the stars
- 16 pieces 3 x 3″ for the stars
- 16 pieces 3 x 3″ for the background
- 16 pieces 2 1/4 x 2 1/4″ for the background
For the middle of the stars you can cut the motif out of the fabric. We need four 4″ squares. This uses rather more fabric but looks much nicer.
Use the 3″ squares to create half-square triangles, or HST for short. I’ve explained how to do that in this article. The HSTs are then trimmed back to 2 1/4″. You need eight pieces per block, so a total of 32 for the quilt.
Two HSTs are now sewn together to make a pair with the patchwork foot No. 37. As you can see from the picture, these form the points of the stars. The layout shows you how the remaining parts go together. Make sure you keep the exact seam allowance of 1/4″.
I did the quilting with the walking foot No. 50 with Mettler embroidery thread No. 9814.
For the photo shoot I was provided with a beautiful old doll’s pram. It actually has pride of place in a Swedish holiday home! It made the long journey specially for this occasion. Looking at my early baby photos in a well-thumbed album I see that I used to lie in a similar pram, though naturally mine was somewhat bigger.
The little lamb has been with me for some time now and was allowed to be part of the shoot. I sewed it a few years ago, and the instructions came from the book “i love patchwork” by Rashida Coleman-Hale, who designed the background fabric I’ve used here for the doll’s quilt.
Enjoy the last days of Advent!
Best wishes,
Dorthe Niemann
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