It’s written in the binding! Bind a baby quilt with baby’s name

Yesterday, on QUILTsocial I showed you how great the Brother NQ900 is for piecing and machine quilting our Elephant Baby Quilt. Today, I’m going to use more of the machine’s decorative stitches to sew down the binding and make the label for the quilt.

Making the label

Back in November on QUILTsocial, I shared with you my new favorite way of making fast and easy permanent quilt labels. On that label, I just hand wrote the information with a permanent marker, but since this awesome machine can embroider letters, I decided to use the same method but make an embroidered label.

When I first looked at the character stitches on the Brother NQ900, I thought that I would stitch each letter individually, for example, I would set the machine to stitch an “F”, it would stitch, then I would set it for an “A” and it would stitch that letter. BUT, after reading the manual I realized that I can program up to 70 patterns or characters all at once!! So, using the stitch guide on the top of the machine, I programmed in the words “Welcome to the Family”. You can see that on the LCD screen, the machine shows the last six characters that will be stitched, so you can check your spelling, and the foot that you attach, the “N” foot.

I drew lines on my label parallel to the folded edge, and used them to guide the machine as it stitched. The machine automatically stitches reinforcement stitches at the beginning and end of EACH letter, and leaves a thread in between the letters in the words.

I used small scissors to snip the threads between the letters stitched with the Brother NQ900.

I pinned the label to the back of the quilt, as I showed in my QUILTsocial post last November.

In order to use the decorative stitches on the Brother NQ900 to sew down the binding on the front of the quilt, I first sewed the binding to the back of the baby quilt, and then folded around to the front.

Next, I selected a stitch to use for securing the folded edge of the binding. I decided on Utility stitch #68 which looks like one of the cross stitch designs. The LCD screen shows me to use the “N” foot.

After stitching that design for a while, I decided that I really wanted to use more than one stitch to go all the way around the quilt, so I checked out the stitch guide and picked Decorative Stitch #12 which looks like a snowflake.

Here are the snowflakes stitched on the binding.

I kept stitching my way around the quilt, changing the stitch every six inches or so, when all of a sudden I thought – “OMG – why am I not stitching WORDS onto the binding???”. Since I don’t know what the new baby’s name is going to be, I decided on the word “BABY” repeated over and over with a heart in between. Just think, if the baby had already been born, you could stitch his name, birth date and birth weight on the binding. How cool is THAT??

Here are the words that I stitched on the binding. I did find it a bit harder to keep everything lined up nicely when I was stitching the words, instead of just one of the other decorative stitches. But I found that if I stitched a bit slower and paid close attention it worked quite well!

So my baby quilt is all done and ready for the new addition. And I enjoyed using the Brother NQ900 so much this week that I asked if I can make it a new PERMANENT addition to my sewing room. Yes, I loved using it so much that I asked if I can buy it for myself!! Funny thing is that yesterday I was telling Jean Boyd, and she said that she was thinking of asking them the same thing!!

Thanks for hanging out with me this week! I think Spring is finally on its way, have a nice weekend and I’ll see you again in a few weeks!