Long Underwear quilt top finished!

This is another fun top designed by Lori Holt - and it is very whimsical! I shared it a while ago when the middle was done as I totally enjoyed making the long underwear part of this top. I’ve heard of people making this one for a baby - using baby fabric, naturally.

However, this particular quilt design came from the book by Lori called Prairie Home and yes, Quilted Twins has it in stock. You can get yours here.

Now the book called for specific fabrics. I did not use those. For the long underwear blocks, about half of them are Lori Holt fabrics. The others are just things I had on my shelves and ones that I thought fit the theme of the quilt (snowflakes, for instance).

For the outer blocks I did use a variety of fabrics and didn’t keep to any sort of color scheme, except that they were all Lori Holt fabrics, pulled from my boxes of her fabrics.

I did not use the latest designs. I actually don’t have that much of the latest ones, so there’s that. But you can substitute easily with her fabrics. The charm with her designs, to me, are the designs themselves and the nicely deeply saturated, but not 100% saturated colors as the fabrics from a distance are not too different from one another when they are the smallish prints. A lot of her fabrics have a bit of white in them, and I can tell the difference between a very dark color when I bring in other fabrics that I thought “went with” hers.

Rachael, my sis, does have a variety of Lori Holt fabrics now on the site. Check them out here.

I don’t want to go into that here, but it is something I’ve noticed.

Anyway, I had put this one together and had a problem fitting the pieced blocks to the center because my pieced blocks all ended up BIGGER than they were supposed to be. So, my length of strips were too long. Sadly, I had put them on, trying to ease it all in, but after having done so much work on the top, decided I absolutely did not like the look, so I took apart all the last two borders - the off white and the pieced blocks strips. So, that took a few hours!!!

I then measured the center of the quilt and did it like I should have done from the beginning. I measured the center lengthwise (the long john blocks), then measured my strip of blocks. Sure enough, I needed to take out almost 2” from the length!

So, I took apart the blocks from the sashing strips and chopped off 1/4” from each sashing strip (the rectangles that went between the blocks), hoping that if I didn’t need to take off 1/4” off each sashing piece, it would not be that noticeable. I knew my blocks were all slightly too big. I’m just not that great at piecing the way Lori says to do it. In the future, I may do her half square triangles the way I am most comfortable with rather than the way she tells you to do it.

(I get the best results when I cut out squares that are bigger, sew on each side of a diagonal line and trim down to the right size instead of adding an “easy corner triangle” to a block just to make a half square triangle). If you didn’t get that, just ignore that.

It worked. When I put that strip back on, it fit ever so much better! So, it was worth all that taking out. Believe me, I didn’t want to do it, but I wanted to like the finished quilt after all the work!

I was able to get back to this top after putting the whole thing on hold for the month of August and then into September while I detoured and did the charity quilts. I was chomping at the bit to get to my fun things, but in truth, after 8-9 hours of quilting or binding, I didn’t much feel like doing anything else relating to sewing for a while during that time. I just put things to the side and waited.

So now this is a continuation of those “things you can wear” quilts by Lori that I’ve done so far. She has a bonnet quilt in the Praire Home book that I want to make as well! :)

Thank you so much for coming along with me on this journey!

Have a great day wherever you are reading this!

Becky PetersenComment