By Diane Harris, HQ Stitch Brand Ambassador

I’m continuing to get ready for the arrival of my twin granddaughters in Hong Kong sometime soon. A few weeks back, I wrote about making blankets for newborns. This week I tried something a little different.

I’ve had sample swatches of 100% cotton voile for ages. Several fabric companies produce it and market it to quilters. Voile can have different fibers but mine is all cotton. It’s very lightweight and buttery soft with a higher thread count than ordinary quilting cotton. It drapes like a dream, and it just feels like it should become a baby quilt.

I pulled five fabrics that worked together and pieced them to make a square roughly 30″ x 30″. I left them as big as I could because I liked the large-scale prints and didn’t want to lose them.

The idea was to use a pillow method, so I layered the top and backing right sides together and laid them on top of the batting. (If you’ve ever layered them “top, batting, backing” and had a surprising result with the batting outside the quilt, you’ll never forget the correct order!)

I pinned every 3″ to 4″ because I thought the voile might be somewhat slippery.

I used a stitch length of 2.4mm to sew around the quilt through all the layers, leaving an opening of about 8″ for turning.

I used a dual-feed foot so all the layers would feed evenly under the needle. (When you don’t use this kind of foot, the bottom layer feeds through at a higher rate than the top layers.)

I find the dual-feed foot to be very effective on the HQ Stitch 710, and I’ve never had problems with it. It can also be called a walking foot. It comes included with the 710 which is a really good thing. Many times it’s an add-on accessory and it can be pricey.

After sewing the layers together, I trimmed away the extra backing and batting. But wait…

I leave extra backing and batting in the area of the opening. Making everything look nice in this space after turning seems to go better if I have that extra bit.

With the trimming complete, I reach inside and pull everything so that right sides are out. I take my time at the ironing board to be sure all the seams are completely open. I press the opening carefully so it matches the rest of the quilt edges and then I sew it shut on the machine. The stitches are about 1/8″ from the edges.

Then I add a line of top-stitching about 3/8″ from the edges. I quilted a few lines and squares randomly to hold everything in place.

It’s not fancy but the softness elevates it to something really nice. I think it will be useful as a baby blanket.

Since there will be two babies, I guess maybe there should be two blankets in voile. So I’m off to make another, but this time I’ll try something different for the experiment. Stay tuned!

Tips on voile from Angela Walters.

Learn more about voile with Amy Smart.