Little House, Big Stitches.

I love patchwork.

I like cutting and organizing fabric. I love planning quilts. I love mixing and matching patterns and colors together.

But I hate quilting!

I usually make a quilt top and pass the work onto somebody with a long-arm quilting machine. I’ve never stitched a quilt by hand because the work seemed tedious. Why would I hand stitch when I could use a machine?

Then the pandemic hit and I was one of the lucky folks who got to work from home.

I have been spending more time doing what people have started calling “slow crafts”. These are works that, as the name indicates, come together at a turtle’s pace.

With the isolation that came with working from home, I tried to find a cozy, mindless craft to keep my hands busy in the minutes between meetings. Slow crafts are perfect for this.

Finding a slow craft that worked for me.

I tried knitting and crochet, but those required counting. I tried embroidery but I got too caught up in the design.

I remembered that I had two quilts started—one for my new niece and one for my new nephew who arrived this year. Each was in a different state of finish because I knew I wasn’t going to take them to get quilted. My risk tolerance was too low. So the only option was to quilt them myself.

I never thought I would hand quilt. I never thought I’d do a lot of things I did this year, so here’s a post about a quilt that I finished by hand.

Little House Quilt for Isla

I made this quilt for my new niece, Isla, who arrived in April this year.

Quilt deets

I used this free pattern called “Little Houses” from Suzy Quilts via Birch Fabrics’ website.

The solid colors are Kona Solids in various shades from Robert Kaufman. I can’t for the life of me remember the fabric collection I used for the patterned blocks, but I love this line so much! I bought the fabric as soon as it was released because I knew I wanted to use it for this quilt. So if you’re reading this and know the name of this line, please let me know in the comments!

I took this Creativebug class on Big Stitch Quilting.

Creativebug is a paid service, so I found this other big stitch quilting tutorial to share with you. I used some of my embroidery skills to add some decorative stitching as well. I followed the lines of the patchwork instead of making an intricate pattern since this was my first hand-stitched quilt project.

One of the most fun things about this project is that I used thimbles from two of my great-grandmothers to complete this quilt. It was really fun to connect with them (sort of?) by doing a craft that they used to do by hand.

I’m really happy with how this quilt turned out! I hope that the big stitch quilting holds up so that my niece can enjoy this quilt for many years. My oldest nephew still uses the quilt I made for him when he was a baby (and it warms my heart thinking about this).