Another quilt? Yes!

A few months ago, I finished a Sloth-themed baby quilt for a friend. Sure, parts of it were frustrating — as it was my first time quilting. I wanted to try again, though, and see if I could work through the rough spots. I’m happy to say, this one went a lot smoother and I’m thrilled with the result.

The fabrics I used were all from the Cider Collection by BasicGrey for Moda. The inner squares are from a charm pack I picked up on Etsy at Stone Barn Quilting. The bindings and backing are from the same collection. I picked out three of the charm squares I thought would look the best and ordered yardage from Cute Little Fabric Shop, also on Etsy.  It stands that I buy way more on Etsy than I sell!

I began to lay out this quilt in April, when my friend Lyndsie first told me she was expecting. As I did with the sloth quilt, I positioned all the charm squares on my bed and started shifting them around until I liked the layout.

I again followed a fantastic tutorial by The Cottage Mama, “Charm Pack Baby Quilt Tutorial”. However, the tutorial pretty much ends with sewing the charm squares together. For the complete quilt, I compiled a YouTube playlist of helpful quilting videos.

This time, I really wanted to improve the binding. My corners on the sloth quilt were a little embarrassing. This was an area I wanted to improve. I also thought the binding was too wide; I wanted it to be a little more delicate.

I didn’t want to hand-sew the binding to the back. Firstly, my hand-stitching is all over the place and would look puckered and weird. Secondly, I think a baby could easily pull out simple hand stitches. I opted to use a decorative stitch to hold down the binding. The binding is much shorter on the front, so there was still a lot of fabric under the decorative stitch. To further secure this, I did a stitch-in-the-ditch from the front.

I absolutely love these colors and fabrics. I’ve been to the recipient’s home and I think these are right up her street too.

For the quilting, I followed the suggestion of The Cottage Mama, and did lines around the binding and X’s in each of the charm squares. I did buy a book on free-motion quilting, but I’m still too afraid to try it. Maybe on the next one…

Of course I added my signature tag to the bottom right.

I sent this off last week and heard yesterday that she had received it. (She may have said she even teared up a little.) I’m hoping this will stay in her family a long time. -rp