ALYOF May Finish: Bad Piggies Pixel quilt

I completed my May goal – my bad piggies quilt. I made it a weighted quilt. I thought I had taken more pictures throughout the process, but I guess I didn’t. So I will do the best I can to describe how I made it.

The back is just an angry birds print in blue featuring the pigs. I sandwiched and basted as normal.

The quilt was made up of 16 blocks, each block was 8×8 pixels. So I decided to stitch in the ditch every 4 pixels (approx. 8 inches) to create my pockets. That made 64 pockets to fill. So, I started by stitching the vertical lines. Then I stitched down one side, across the bottom, and up the other side, leaving the top open.

I used a new marking pen to mark the lines. They are supposed to iron out. Of course, it didn’t occur to me to question if it would work until after I had marked most of my quilt. I held my breath and hoped it would disappear. It did! What a relief. I have heard the lines can reappear in the cold. We will just hope that doesn’t happen.

I used poly pellets for the weighting. They had them on sale when I got them. They are 2 pound bags. The rule of thumb for weight is 10% of the person’s weight + 1 lb. My son is roughly 30 pounds so that would be 4 pounds. How delighted was I to discover 4 pounds = 64 ounces? (Yes, I really didn’t know that til I did the math.) So, that meant one ounce per pocket. I diligently weighed out my ounces on my scale. However, for some reason I couldn’t get exactly one ounce to register on the scale so I alternated between .9 and 1.1 ounces. It worked out fine.

I poured each ounce of pellets into each of the 8 columns I created in the quilt. I placed them between the batting and the top of the quilt, figuring there should be some cushioning on the back. Then I held it over my balcony and shook shook shook the pellets to the bottom. Some words of warning: they will not all go obediently to the bottom. They get all stuck in the seams. I did my best to push them down to the bottom, but it wasn’t worth the effort. I figured it would all work out. After I was satisfied with the shaking I sewed the horizontal row. Then I repeated for the next column.

There were also many needle casualties as a result. Again, I did my best to clear the seams as I went along, but there were several times I hit a pellet. Sometimes the needle broke, sometimes it just got jammed up inside a pellet. I ended up taking my plate off a couple times to retrieve needles. Wow. Look what I found under the bobbin case.

Ick. So, my machine got a good cleaning too. Let me also tell you, 4 pounds doesn’t sound like a lot (especially when I am hauling a 30 pound baby around throughout the day) but it is HEAVY. This quilt is heavy.  Once I had worked my way to the top row of the quilt, I sealed off the top and bound it with a different angry bird print in black.

For more posts about this quilt, see here.

For my goal post about this quilt, see here.

 

Linking also to the FAL

Here is my goal post: https://drowninginfabric.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/finish-along-q2/

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