Early in April I signed up for Lisa's Doll Quilt Swap. Round One. She's already on Round Two and has 100 swappers lined up. Wow. Beautiful doll quilts are popping up all around on craft blogs. Many swappers from Round Two have finished already. I received mine almost immediately. The one I made finally went out last week. My apologies go out to my swap partner who had to wait so long for her quilt. The crazy thing is, I signed up for this swap having NEVER made a quilt before. And as many of you know, I don't know how to use a sewing machine, so I stitched my quilt by hand. I worked it in felt, which although not a popular choice, it is my favorite medium. I am happy with the way it turned out, I'm just sad it took me so long.
Some research was involved before I made this quilt. The first thing I learned about Monica, is her favorite color is yellow. Oh, how I wanted to use yellow for the background, but I just didn't have enough yellow felt. So I went with the yellow border of flowers for her. I also learned my she was born in the year of the sheep. That's when I went with this idea.
And I just couldn't help it, but as I stitched along I would sing one of Peanut's songs from his Musikgarten Class, which translated from the German goes like this:
Sleep, baby, sleep,
your father tends the sheep,
your mother shakes the dreamland tree, and down come all the dreams for thee.
Sleep, baby, sleep.
So that's when I added this:
And since Monica is from a bilingual household as well, I also stitched it in Spanish.
The hand stitching went pretty well, but I did have one major mishap. The quilt originally was white, not green, and had a green and yellow floral quilt binding. The words were larger and embroidered on the bottom part of the quilt. However, when I was close to finishing I noticed a tiny spot where I had embroidered duerme bebe duerme. It looked like a tiny red dot of ink. Well, I kept looking at it and it really began to bother me. I thought I could spot clean it. That didn't work. So I added a little soap. Then more water. And before I knew it, I had completely destroyed the bottom half of the quilt. I was devastated! I couldn't believe I had ruined it and didn't even want to look at it again. I put it away for a while before finally realizing I could rescue it by cutting off the section around the flowers. I then stitched it on the green background and restitched the phrases from the song. Then the floral quilt binding did not look quite right, so I found this lovely gold velvet that I think works very well with the felt quilt.
I have to thank Mimi for all her moral support. She even sent me this link, to let me know I am not alone. (Thanks Michelle, it's nice to know I'm not alone).
Whew! I did it. My first doll quilt. I do hope all will be forgiven.
