Baby quilt – my first ever quilting job

I was arranging and culling my fabric stash and was about to take the leftover fabric to be recycled when I saw this quilt pattern on Love Sewing magazine issue 47. Somehow the idea of combining my useless cottons into a baby quilt started to interest me. Soon I was working with my rotary cutter and slicing my cottons into strips. Those strips were then easy to slice into quilt blocks.

I was planning to make rows of blue and yellow but when I put the blocks on the floor it did not look nice. Finally I abandoned the yellow blocks and concentrated only on the blue ones. I only had four different kinds of dark blues that worked together. After playing for a while with different arrangements I realised I could use the same blocks to make a zig-zag pattern, too. I could still sew the quilt using the braid strip method that was on the magazine article but now I had to make mirror images of some of the braids and turn others upside down. After I had the whole quilt pattern arranged on the floor I piled the blocks of the each “braid” carefully in the sewing order to make sewing easy.

It took me two nights to compile the strips. Then I had to cut more blocks since the quilt had became much smaller than I had expected. It was a bit annoying, since I had to attach some of the added blocks to the angled edge of the braid but finally the quilt was big enough.

I used thin polyester wadding and solid navy cotton to back the quilt. Then I started topstitching the quilt. I started from the vertical middle seam and continued alternating between horizontal zig-zag and straight vertical seams pinning each stitching line before stitching. My walking foot was a great help in this and I had not problems of tucks forming anywhere.

I got my new 60 x 90 cm cutting mat just in time to help me to cut the long strips that I needed to bind the edges of the quilt. This YouTube video was a great help in teaching me the whole procedure. I cut the strips 8 cm wide and I sewed the binding on doubled. Instead of stitching in the ditch I hand sewed the remaining edge to the quilt to get the neatest possible outcome.

Mr. McFluffy here was a great help for me when taking pictures. Now the baby quilt is ready and ready for my new niece/nephew who is going to be born in a few months. I am so happy to become an aunt for the first time! This also means that there will be other baby related makes on the blog this year!

I hope you enjoyed reading and thank you for visiting. Do share this post with your friends and happy sewing!

Katja