Doggets – an update.

Many of you liked the Hope for Life puppy quilt post. I made a few more quilts to donate, and took the opportunity to go back and meet the new puppies! I took my youngest daughter with me, since she is as committed to animal welfare as anyone I know. She has been a vegetarian for half of her life, and vegan for almost a year.  She is a really good cook, and we like being the test subjects for her cooking experiments. She was as excited to see the new puppies as I was!

This little fellow is named Thor, and he was one of 10 siblings. The poor mother looks sleep deprived, but she seems like a good doggy.

I had some more flannel fabrics, and these had a dachshund pattern.  My husband made me a template for a dachshund silhouette. I cut out a fabric appliqué, but didn’t have the right color matched fabric to lay them against.

The red fabric was pretty, but didn’t match the pattern of the dachshund fabric. I still plan to use the silhouette with a simpler, matching fabric.

I was left wondering how to integrate the template with the pretty, blue green weiner dog fabric. I opted to quilt the silhouette using a single stitch of brown thread, with a walking foot. I drew around the template with a FriXion iron off pen. I’ve had great results, although you might want to have a look at Lee’s experience,  at Freshly Pieced. She has used the pens as well with good success.

Here is how the dachshund doggy quilts looked (with dogs and without).

 I might try a thicker thread next time, for more contrast. I considered going over the quilting twice, but the nooks and crannies in the template proved tricky (i.e.I got bored sewing it on all four blankets!).

I also do not do traditional binding. I basically sew the batting to one side of the blanket (wrong side), then flip it so both right sides are together and sew it as though sewing a pillow casing. (Is this called facing binding? When I flip the right sides out, I top stitch very closely to the edge to close the gap from where it was turned right side out. Then I add one or more stitches around the outside and some decorative stitching in the middle.

You can see Victoria and Albert trying the quilts out before we donated. I included the picture to give a sense of the size. Also, because I love posting pictures of my dogs!

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