Helping Hand'ful Quilt

Ms. Michelle, our daughter's teacher at the Montessori school has taken great care of twelve Toddler's in Gabrielle's class. As part of a fund-raising project, I volunteered to sew a quilt for the Toddler classroom. The auction quilt was completed about one month ago, but I made a duplicate set of hand-prints for the teacher.



Ms. Michelle will be leaving the Montessori school before the year-ends to have major back-surgery, this hastened my completion of this project. I hadn't quite decided whether the hand prints would be placed in a cloth booklet as a keepsake for the teacher, or whether I would sew another quilt.

Recently I purchased a quilt book called "Cotton Theory Quilting" which explained how to sew a reversible quilt by quilting and then assembling, rather than assembling and then quilting.



This technique makes quilting easier as there is less material underneath the arm of the sewing machine (which is hard to manipulate). Instead of ending with a solid fabric on the back, the theory is that either side could be considered the front and potentially could be the completed in a different color scheme.





This quilt was the dry-run to try this new technique. Although I made several mistakes while quilting this small table top quilt, I learned a great deal in the process and may find my technique improves significantly with the next project. I loved the bright colors and experimented with a variegated border.


I purchased the book and DVD from Nancy's Notions website.