Originally Posted by quiltlaker
Hi- Now that I have the book, Easy Bazaar Crafts 1981) and have looked at the directions, I find there are none for a quilt, just for ornaments, toys, etc. If I were to make a lap quilt for a friend, (male who loves cats) where would I begin? I would want a muslin background to stitch on, but how do I know how much to buy, how big the squares need to be. etc. I see from the pic that there is red sashing as well. How wide? How long etc. Basic questions, I know, but I am an avowed newbie. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
How fast do you need this quilt? I'm afraid that if you have never made a quilt before, and if you are planning to hand-embroider the cats, it may take you too long to make it.
If you still want to go ahead, I recommend taking the patterns from the book and enlarging them to fit inside a 12-inch finished square. You probably need to do this yourself with a copy machine (if the patterns need to be enlarged) because copy stores may think it's a copyright violation. You need to leave space around the patterns, so I would make sure that no cat dimension was greater then 10" (a little smaller would be ok, but not bigger). Planning a quilt with 12" finished squares is fairly easy.
How many squares you make depends a lot on how big you want the quilt to be -- lap size or full size?
I recommend bring your book to a quilt fabric store and asking for help in picking out the background fabric. Muslins vary wildly in quality, and you want a decent quality muslin. If you plan to hand embroider, you want a plain fabric that is easy to hand needle. Again, how much fabric you need depends on the size of the quilt and how many quilt squares you are going to embroider.
It's a good idea to machine wash and machine dry the muslin, or muslin-like fabric, so there is no shrinking after you do the embroidery. If you are going to machine embroider, then heavy starching is a good idea (I can give directions on how to do this if you need them). When you cut the squares, be very generous. If you plan on 12" finished squares, then cut the squares 14" and trim them down to correct size (12-1/2") after the embroidery is finished.
You must test your red embroidery thread to make sure it does not bleed. You can do this by roughly embroidering something on your fabric and placing the combination in a glass of water. If the red stains the fabric, you need to ask people here for help. (I do not embroider, so I am not up on current methods; I just know that many red threads are not colorfast.)
Sashing can wait until you have the squares embroidered. In general, sashing should be no wider than one-third the size of the squares and narrower is often better. If you have 12" squares, I would guess that 3"-wide sashing is as large as you would want to go.
Have you ever made a quilt? I'm thinking that you might be much better off purchasing fabric with cats on it and finding a simple pattern to show off the cat fabric. Sometimes sooner is better than perfect. You could always work on the embroidered quilt after you finish the easy one.