A Baby Quilt Story

After a bit of a crafting hiatus, I jumped back in by making a baby quilt. Novelty print fabrics are just so darn cute, and I figured that making a baby quilt would be both cheaper and a heck of a lot faster than making another full-size quilt. Fortunately and conveniently, my friend Sarah just happens to have a little one on the way. So, off I set to make my first baby quilt.

I used the log cabin pattern that I found for free here. Picking out the right fabric was a bit of challenge. Sarah and her husband are keeping the gender of their forthcoming child confidential, so I had to pick something gender-neutral. Also, they're decorating their nursery around the Nashville Zoo prints in the Spirit of Nashville collection. I love, love, love the Spirit of Nashville prints and have framed and displayed many of the postcards in my own apartment. Very classy choice, Sarah.

To find the best fabric, I went to Etsy. I find that the sellers on Etsy do an excellent job of putting together great combinations of fabric for quilts. In the end, I settled on the a collection comprised of fabrics by Lizzy House, Erin McMorris, and Alexander Henry that was put together by Etsy seller fabricworm. I figured that blues, orange, and green was a decently safe bet in terms of gender-neutrality. Others might disagree.

After these decisions were made, it was simply a matter of following the directions and putting it all together. I think that this one ended up much better than my previous one. I tried to be more careful about my piecing this time so that the lines would eventually line up. With the exception of one row, I got it dead on. Somehow, I got my seam allowances off so it probably
ended up smaller than it was intended to be.

I put a lot of thought into how I should do the quilting. I do it on my standard sewing machine, so it's admittedly a little challenging maneuvering all of the fabric through such a small space. Additionally, because each fabric strip was so small, I wasn't quite sure what borders I should outline. In the end, mostly because I'm lazy, I decided to quilt big circles, which presented it's own challenges. I'm not very good at making small curves on my machine, so some spots look a little messy, but I think it's decent.

In the future, I'd like to get into hand-quilting. Recently, I visited the Textile Museum, which I always assumed would be a real bore despite my love of fabric. In the end, it was awesome, and they had a great exhibit on Amish quilts. The piecing of the quilts weren't all very complicated, but the quilting itself had some very intricate designs. It inspired me to maybe try this out in the future, but I will definitely need to develop some patience before I set out on that venture.