Project Baby Quilts - Part 2

Once I had completed all of my quilt blocks, I began to lay them out according to my pattern.

It was at this point that I realized how incredibly large this quilt was intended to be. Way too large for a baby quilt! In fact, I had enough blocks to create two baby-sized quilt tops, which is just how I decided to move foward. Unfortunately, this meant that I have to abandon the blocking pattern that I had my heart set on. In the end, I came up with the following two quilt tops--one slightly larger than the other.

While I ended up with two decent quilt tops, I can't say that I'm in love with either one. There's just way too many things going on. I love all of the fabrics by themselves and even together when they're all laying there as a pile of fabric, but when it comes together as a quilt, it's just a lot to take in. I mean, we are talking 8 different prints, and 7 different plain colors. I think I would be head over heels for these quilts if they were dominated by the rose pattern + medium pink plain fabric. But alas, they are not.

So, already in this process, I have learned two valuable lessons for the future:
1) Begin by reading the entire pattern--including the finished size.
2) Less can be more, and more can simply be too much.

Check and check. So, with my dissatisfaction at its peak for the quilt tops, I thought I'd try to do a little something special for the quilt backs. Like I said, I'm all about these roses, so I decided to try my hand at a little applique.

Following the lead of "Quilts, Baby!"--which I recieved for Christmas--I decided to go the route of just leaving the edges of the applique raw to fray a bit over time. Not only did this make the whole process sound incredibly easy, I also just thought it'd be cute. So, I carefully cut out a couple of roses from some of the scrap fabric I had left after cutting out my quilt pieces. In the absense of fusible interfacing, I applied a bit of temporary fabric glue to hold the appliques in place while I sewed them on. And then using a simple running stitch, I sewed them on. The book had instructed to only make one running stitch, but I just didn't trust that the edges wouldn't fray through the stitch and fall off over time. So, for an extra line of defense, I added a second running stitch. These guys will also get quilted over, so that will also help to keep them in place.

I love how they ended up!

In addition to the appliques, I also added some personalization by embroidering a name and year. I simply sketched out the name with a disappearing ink fabric marker and embroidered away using a simple stem stitch.

With these little extras, I am hoping that I will end up with a couple of quilts that I can feel proud of.