I finally finished the baby quilt I was working on. I am so embarrassed about it. The baby was born in August. I found the fabric then but no ideas of what to make would come to me. UGH.
I started in June making the quilt…then in August was cleaning and found “THE FABRIC I SHOULD HAVE USED”. The gal who had the baby’s parents live just down the block the from us. She graduated with our daughter Kayla. She later became a first responder here in town with Hubby. She’s since moved and went from being a nurse to a flight nurse acting as the nurse on board helicopter’s flying critically hurt patients to larger hospitals.
So…you can see why when I found fabric that said “Air Rescue” on it, I needed to make the quilt with that fabric!!
Here is the finished quilt…sorry the photo is a little dark.
There is no pattern. There is no block. It is entirely random. I hadn’t intended this when I started. I had wanted to fussy cut blocks and then round them with squares. I was doing it over nap time one day and accidentally cut them at 6″ vs the 6 1/2″ I intended. Well I couldn’t waste the fabric so…plan B came to be. I cut some coordinating solid fabrics and just started sewing. I would get a piece fairly big and start on another. Then I ended up having lots of little left over pieces of solid colors and I started sewing them together.
The quilt required a lot of getting up and sitting down…then measuring.
Here’s a close up of my quilting….Squares…I love doing this motif. It’s so easy and works well on boy quilts. If you look careful you can see that all of the solids aren’t the same tone. Check out the greens. This is a great style of quilt to make if you want to clean up all the little left overs of solids.
I love this type of random improvise quilting. It’s funny, I don’t love large modern quilts though. I don’t know if I would love doing this if I was making a large full sized quilt though. I seam to be drawn to it when making a baby quilt though.
Another reason this quilt stalled out was that I was trying to conserve the novelty fabric. To do that I had to find a really good coordinating fabric. I finally found it at LouAnn’s Quilt Garden in Oelwein. When it was time for backing, I had the top too big for a single cut of 45″ fabric. I think the quilt ended up something like 47″ x 52″. I make my baby quilts big so they can grow with them. Anyway…I needed to make the novelty print fabric wider so I improvised some more.
This really is a fun print. I don’t remember where I got it.
Picking a color for the binding fabric was super easy….RED!
I took the pictures, wrapped the quilt up and then gave it Hubby to go deliver….he’s delivering and I’m done writing the blog post about the quilt…ah. It feels so good to have it truly finished!!
Love your quilt. I like these sort of quilts and it worked out so well with your novelty fabrics. Very bright and jolly colours for a boy.
Love how you improvised! So cute & colorful! Great quilt for a baby boy!
Congrats on the finish! It’s a really cute baby quilt that the little one (and mamma) will love.
Love the totally finished feeling! I finally caught up with my nephew and got his grad quilt out of my house. He had seen it, just not with the binding finished and label written. Now, hopefully, I can run the long arm all weekend and get another finish “high”.
Great quilt. It is encouraging to see that even experienced quilters make mistakes. Many times I’ve started out with a pattern, only to have to regroup because of a big error. I’m beginning to think it’s all part of my creative process