I’ve been pretty terrible at making time for me recently. My poor son broke his wrist and has been demanding a lot of attention – rightly so. Anyway, a few weeks ago I did manage a little progress on my Shipping Forecast quilt (I will finish it this year!). I used my Cricut Maker so thought I would share a few details of how it saved me time with my little Shipping Forecast quilt.

Using the Cricut Maker to quilt

You may remember I had pieced the felt map of the UK to the backing fabric, and I had cut the shapes I wanted to applique out of some gorgeous wool felt. I wanted an idea of each Shipping Forecast area so used a tacking thread to add the lines, just to help me when I embroidered the name of each area so it wouldn’t run over. As I did this I started to think that embroidering the name of each area, of which there were 24, would take ages. So I decided to use my Cricut Maker to help.

First of all I typed up the Shipping Forecast areas into a Word document. I cut each one out and placed them on my quilt top. I did this to make sure they were well spread out, they fitted into each area (some of which were quite small) and there was room for my felt shapes too.

When I was happy there was room for everything I typed them into Cricut Design Space.

I bought some Every Day Iron On from Hobbycraft and used my Cricut Maker to cut out the names. This took quite a while as the names were small and there were 24 of them.

However I spent a happy evening weeding each Shipping Forecast name. When this was done I used the EasyPress2 to fix them in place, making sure they were within their area and well spread out.

This took an evening but was worth the effort. Each word shines when the fabric moves and is quite eye catching. It will also contrast with the wool felt when I stitch those on, which I think is my next step.