Emma’s Quilt

Meet Emma.

She is one of the dolls in our family.

She has been in desperate need of a quilt, so much so that my girls have been using my mini quilts as doll quilts. I took that as a hint.

So I made this quilt for Emma.

It was inspired by the postage stamp quilt in Denyse Schmidt’s book, Modern Quilts, Traditional Inspiration.

My 5-year old daughter was my co-designer/co-creator of the quilt. I asked her what color she thought the quilt should be. “Orange!” was her reply. Luckily, I have a ton of orange scraps just waiting to be cut into 1.5″ squares. I used mostly solids in different shades of orange and added some off-white scraps. I included bits of blue here and there to cool down the orange a bit. I also included a few animal prints just for fun.

Using Denyse’s paper bag technique took the guess work out of which squares to sew together. The result was a nice randomness throughout the quilt.

I quilted diagonal straight lines – triple diagonal lines in one direction and a single diagonal in the other direction.

Once I put the quilt on Emma’s bed, I realized that something was missing. So I made this little pillow to match.

And on top of needing a quilt, Emma also needed some new clothes since half the time she’s lying around the house in the nude. I stitched up this denim jumper for her using a pair of my husband’s old jeans. It felt good to upcycle!

Our little Emma is in better shape now: a new quilt, pillow and jumper. And I’ve got three finishes to show for it!