I made Made by Rae's Storytime Squares Quilt for baby S. It was really hard to choose a pattern for a baby quilt. I'm not really a quilter. I dislike tiny pieces and shy away from triangles and appliques. I tend to gravitate towards simple, more modern quilt designs. Sometimes I wonder why we take perfectly good fabric, cut it up into shreds and spend hours stitching it back together. If I pick an easy pattern and fabric I love, it doesn't seem like that.
I absolutely love florals and leaves, so yeah, this quilt is very reflective of my personal taste! The nice thing about having a little one is they are too small to have an opinion so they wear whatever you fancy!
I chose an Art Gallery fabric as my 'mommy fabric' from which I coordinated the other fabrics.
I snatched up this new pink Joel Dewberry print. Love!
This orange leafy print from Cloud 9 is one of my favorites:
I cut approximately 6 squares each of 8 different fabrics. The quilt pattern calls for 54" fabric for the backing. It's much easier for me to use a standard 42-44" quilting cotton, so I scaled down the pattern so I did not have to piece the backing together. I cut 5" squares instead of 5.5" squares.
The piecing was pretty easy, especially because I'm used to making larger quilts. The batting I used is a low-loft cotton blend from Joann's. I used my fabric weights to lay out the three layers, then basted it together using some quilting safety pins.
I've tied quilts many times, but this is the first time I quilted on my sewing machine. I didn't free motion quilt - I simply used my walking foot and a straight stitch to quilt the layers together. I was surprised how easy it was!
Then came the machine stitched binding. I first trimmed the edges of the quilt using a 4-thread overlock stitch on my serger:
This tutorial, explaining how to do a machine binding, was really helpful. I followed it with one exception: I like joining binding pieces diagonally because there is less bulk when you are sewing the binding to the quilt.
This is a view of the BACK of the quilt...the messy side of the stitching and it looks pretty good!
If this girl doesn't end up being a flower and leaf lover like her mom, grandma and great-grandma, I shall be very put out!